The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  While wind has become a big business, it is still small—only 2 percent of total electricity generated in the United States. It is also more expensive than other sources, although the cost is declining.

  But hopes for the future development of wind are very high. In the United States, the Department of Energy has proposed a national target for the United States to get 20 percent of total electricity from wind by the year 2030. Another study predicts that, globally, wind could be 22 percent of total electricity supply by 2030. Are such ambitious targets doable ?2

  After all, wind runs into certain obstacles. The more successful that wind is—the more wind in the electricity system—the bigger the challenge of integrating it into the existing system. Wind does not blow all the time, and its strength varies. That makes it intermittent, which means you cannot count on it being available when you want it. As a result, wind, as with solar, is not well suited to provide the constant base-load generation. Something else needs to be available the other two thirds of the time when the wind is not blowing sufficiently. That something else requires additional investment—and added cost—for new conventional generation in order to pick up the slack. Wind’s intermittency also creates new complexities for managing the overall grid and balancing the different energy sources. Moreover, wind supplies tend to be dispersed, and often distant from where people live, and thus require substantial new transmission systems to deliver the electricity.

  Today’s wind turbines are not simple machines—and they are very large. Yet while the power electronics, computer controls, and engineering of a modern 25-story-tall wind turbine may be complex, the basic concept is not. The energy supply—wind—is provided free of charge, courtesy of Mother Nature. Winds are generated by the spinning of planet Earth itself, by the irregularities of the Earth’s surface (from mountains and valleys to oceans), and by solar radiation. For when air is heated by the sun, it expands and becomes lighter and thus rises, creating a vacuum, and other cooler air rushes in to fill the vacuum. That flow may be as gentle as a breeze or as powerful as a tempest. It is this direct impact of the sun on the temperature of air that most explicitly qualifies wind as a form of solar energy.

  A traditional windmill captures the moving force of the wind—its kinetic energy—and transforms it into mechanical energy. In an electric turbine, the mechanical energy is then transformed by a generator into electricity. A large wind turbine is really a small power plant. The wind may be free, but that is not true of the system required to harness it in large volumes, put it through the grid, and deliver it to consumers. How much more will it cost? How much actual backup investment in other sources will be needed? Do these constraints put limits on what can be expected of wind? All these are subjects of debate, and all are part of the mystery of wind—the mystery of how big it can get and how large a role it can play in meeting future needs for electricity.

  “THE FREE BENEFIT OF WIND”

  The oldest use of wind was to fill billowing sails of ships and move them across the water, supplementing the human labor of oarsmen. On land, windmills go back a thousand years or more. They were developed to provide mechanical energy for two essential endeavors—grinding grain and water management; that is, pumping, irrigation, and drainage. This greatly reduced the need for exhausting, time-consuming human labor of pounding grain and hauling water.

  By the tenth century or perhaps even earlier, primitive windmills were already working in Persia, and then spread through the Islamic world and into China. Windmills also began to appear in Europe. In medieval England, they represented an attempt by rural entrepreneurs to do an end-run around the authorities of the day. The nobility and the church jealously guarded their exclusive rights to use riverbanks for their waterwheels, which ground grain. These monopolies were a source of wealth and power. For acquiring grain from a waterwheel spared a woman the daily hours of hard work and monotony that she would otherwise expend pounding grain for her family.

  In the twelfth century, in Suffolk, England, a certain fearsome Abbot Samson, from the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, controlled the nearby riverbanks on which his watermills operated. In order to circumvent the abbot’s monopoly, an elderly clergyman known to history only as Herbert built a rudimentary windmill. Abbot Samson, enraged by this challenge to his monopoly over grinding grain, ordered the windmill dismantled. Herbert replied with a ringing defense: “The free benefit of the wind ought not to be denied to any man.” Alas, this battle cry of freedom only enraged Abbot Samson more. Herbert’s windmill was destroyed.3

  But technology could not be stayed. Other windmills did begin to sprout across England—indeed, thousands of them—and across Europe. Don Quixote famously charged, lance in hand, at “30 or more monstrous giants” despite the protestations from Sancho Panza that “most certainly they were windmills.” The encounter sent Cervantes’ noble knight tumbling and gave rise to the adage “tilting at windmills.”

  Windmills became a familiar part of the natural landscape in Holland, where they were used not only for grinding grain but for draining marshes and lakes and thus opening up much land to cultivation behind newly constructed dikes. Windmills in Europe came to be used for many other industrial purposes, from crushing olives to making gunpowder to powering the bellows of blast furnaces. The widespread use of windmills, along with watermills, one historian has written, “marked the beginning of the breakdown of the traditional world in which man had to depend for power on animal or vegetable sources of power. It was the distant announcement of the Industrial Revolution.” It is estimated that a quarter of Europe’s total industrial energy came from wind in the centuries between 1300 and the emergence of steam and coal in the nineteenth century.4

  THE ELECTRIFICATION OF WIND

  In 1883, just a year after Edison’s Pearl Street station opened, people began to wonder, could wind compete with coal in generating power? Scientific American wrote: “It seems incomprehensible that so ready and potent an agent should escape practical use so completely.” Yes, it added, wind was “destitute of all uniformity. . . sometimes furious. . . sometimes absolutely nothing, and at all times unsteady and capricious.” And it pointed to what continues to be a very key question—the problem of intermittency: “How shall we store the power that may come to us by day or night, Sundays and week days, gathering it at the time we do not need it and preserving it till we do. This is the problem.”

  “Who,” asked Scientific American, “is the man to solve it?”

  That man, it turned out, was a certain Charles Brush, one of Edison’s great rivals. The Brush lights, used for outdoor lighting, had been one of the main competitors to Edison’s lightbulb. By 1880 some 6,000 of his Brush lights were illuminating cities across the country. This made Brush a rich man.

  In 1887, in his backyard on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland—just down the street on “Millionaires’ Row” from the world’s leading oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller—Brush set out to solve the problem of wind and electricity. He built a 60-foot windmill connected to a dynamo and a network of batteries in the basement. With this he illuminated his mansion. Brush’s machine was the first time that electricity was, in a practical way, generated from the wind. While praising Brush, Scientific American cautioned its readers not to assume that lighting, powered by wind, “is cheap because the wind costs nothing. On the contrary, the cost of the plant is so great as to more than offset the cheapness of the motive power.” Eventually Brush succumbed to temptation and hooked up his home to the centrally generated city electric system that his competitor Edison had pioneered—it was more convenient. But Brush had proved that the wind could be a source of electric power.5

  The rapid spread of centrally generated electricity in cities and towns meant that there was no demand for wind-generated electricity. This was not true, however, for America’s isolated farms and ranches.

  To meet their needs engineer-entrepreneurs developed small electricity-generating windmills along with battery systems to store the power. Tr
aditional windmills had been used for a traditional purpose, pumping water. Wind electricity could do more. It could provide farmers and ranchers—and their wives and children—with light, and reduce tiring, repetitive physical labor.

  Two farm boys from North Dakota, the Jacobs brothers, took the lead. One of them, Marcellus, designed the blades by observing how the propellers worked on the small planes he had learned to fly. Their advertising trumpeted: “Wind! The Cheapest Power in the World Is Easily Available to Every Farm Home.” The brothers also marketed Jacobs-branded appliances, ranging from refrigerators to waffle makers. An estimated 30,000 Jacobs wind turbines were sold, along with hundreds of thousands of turbines from other manufacturers. 6

  But Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal would eventually disconnect many of the blades turning on America’s farms and ranches. As the rural electric cooperatives, backed by the new Rural Electrification Administration (REA), began to spread their wires and grids across the landscape in the late 1930s, they delivered a superior quality electricity, and over the next two decades, wind faded away as a power source for America’s farmers and ranchers.

  ON GRANDPA’S KNOB WITH PALMER PUTNAM

  In the winter and spring of 1941, convoys of trucks carrying what would amount to 500 tons of equipment and parts, including two blades each weighing eight tons, inched their way up an arduous dirt track with almost impossible hairpin turns, to the top of a mountain called Grandpa’s Knob, a dozen or so miles from the Vermont city of Rutland. All this industrial activity on this isolated mount was aimed at building a windmill that would generate 1.5 megawatts—an almost unimaginable output at the time.

  Palmer Putnam, the person responsible, was the grandson of the founder of the publisher G. P. Putnam’s & Sons. Though he himself served a short time as its president, Putnam’s heart was in engineering. Educated at MIT, he had worked as a geologist in the Belgian Congo. Later, when he built a house on Cape Cod, Putnam found “both the winds and the electric rates surprisingly high.” To Putnam the solution was obvious: wind power.7

  Putnam assembled a first-rate team, including some of America’s most prominent scientists as well as leading companies, among them General Electric, which helped with the electrical mechanisms. The quite isolated and inaccessible Grandpa’s Knob was chosen because of the quality of its winds.

  By the autumn of 1941, Putnam’s 175-foot-tall windmill was generating electricity. Rather than powering a single farm, it fed into the grid of Central Vermont Public Service, just as a coal-fired plant would, adding its contribution to the anonymous electrons moving through the wires. This insight—that the wind system could feed into the whole grid, rather than be independent—was one of Putnam’s fundamental contributions. Wind could be integrated into, rather than compete with, the existing system.8

  Palmer’s turbine worked well until the middle of World War II, when a mechanical failure shut it down. By that time, Putnam was designing amphibious landing craft for the invasion at Normandy and working on strategy for amphibious warfare in the Pacific. It was not until 1945 that the windmill could be fixed. Just a few weeks later, one of the eight-ton blades came loose, spun off, and crashed down the mountainside. That was the end. There was neither the funds to repair it nor the willpower.

  Yet that abandoned 175-foot tower on Grandpa’s Knob would turn out to be a beacon over the decades, for it proved what was possible. As one scientist explained to a congressional committee in 1974, Putnam’s wind turbine “was really the precursor of all of the wind work that is being done today.”9

  THE MODERN INDUSTRY

  By the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of the oil embargo and amid the quest for alternative energy sources, wind electricity became a serious subject. But the wind industry, as it is today, owes its birth not only to OPEC but also to two other things: the Danish farm-machinery business and California tax credits. Without their marriage, there might well not be the industry that now exists. That, however, was not the way it began.

  After the 1973 oil crisis, the federal government began to fund wind energy research and development. For wind power to be credible to utilities, larger-scale machines would be necessary, and the government turned to large defense contractors. After all, if they could build jets and bombers, and helicopters and planes with propellers, then surely they could build tall towers with rotating propeller-like blades. A host of companies went to work on the problem—Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, United Technologies, General Electric, and Alcoa, among others. But these early wind machines generally performed poorly. “We tended to be blinded because windmills had been used for more than a thousand years,” one government R&D manager concluded. “We thought the technology was there and all we had to do was bring it into the twentieth century.”10

  With the deep program cuts of the Reagan era, the federally funded wind power R&D program came to an end.

  “CALIFORNIA WIND RUSH”

  While federal R&D spending was terminated before it could be effective in promoting wind energy, other government policies—regulatory and tax—were available. First there was the aforementioned Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, PURPA, which required utilities to take power from small non-utility generators. And then there were the tax credits, generous tax credits. The federal government provided tax credits for wind power, and so did the state of California, even for projects that generated little or no electricity. Indeed, the person who really made the difference, and did as much as any single person to launch wind power, was California’s Governor Jerry Brown. Developers also got accelerated depreciation on their wind assets, and all this made the investment almost risk-free. As a kicker, California wind developers would be paid for any electricity sold into the grid as the state’s generous PURPA “avoided” rates for renewable electricity.

  The result was California’s extraordinary wind rush. Committed wind advocates, serious developers, skilled engineers, and practical visionaries were joined by flimflam promoters, tax shelter salesmen, and quick-buck artists. Thus was the modern wind industry born.

  The frenzy gave rise to a critical innovation. Rather than depend upon a single mammoth machine, as Palmer Putnam had, smaller turbines were clustered together and connected by a computer network so that they functioned as though they were a single machine. These networked wind turbines became known as wind farms. This approach had the added value that if a few machines went down, the system would continue to function, and most of the electricity would continue to flow into the grid.

  If California was, for a time, the Saudi Arabia of wind, then it had three giant wind fields with enormous wind resources. One was in the northern part of the state, the Altamont Pass, between the San Joaquin Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. Others were in the Tehachapi Pass, south of Bakersfield, and the San Gorgonio Pass, near Palm Springs.

  Developers raced to acquire sites. Many of the best locations were inaccessible and took much ingenuity, great effort, and some daring to develop. But it was only when they had started to build their machines that the developers found out how truly violent and turbulent and unpredictable those winds could be—and how daunting it would be to harness them.

  The machines would be tested every day by the actual conditions under which they operated. The wind, said an engineer at the time, “beats on you all day. It never lets up. Your eyes get affected. . . You can literally lean your body into the wind, and it will suspend you.” Many turbines could not stand up to the stress. Blades crumpled or flew off, towers toppled over, electronics malfunctioned. Most produced far less electricity than manufacturers had promised. Reliability and performance became a central issue.

  Until the arrival of wind, the tiny community of Cabazon, ten miles west of Palm Springs, had been known mainly as the home of Hadley’s, a sprawling fruit store, famous for the delicious date shakes it sold to thirsty travelers on their way back from the desert. Then, with great hope, a wind park was built in Cabazon. For Cabazon was in the San Gorgonio Pass, the juncture
between the Mojave Desert and the Los Angeles Basin. The ferocious winds disabled the Cabazon turbines almost immediately. The wind machines produced virtually no electricity. Rather they were “an eyesore of broken and twisted blades.”11

  One of the most important and committed pioneers was James Dehlsen. His company, Zond, was partly named for the zonda, the wind that blows from the Andes down over Argentina, and for the German word that means “probe.”

  Along with everybody else in the California wind business, Dehlsen found that his economics depended in part upon the tax credit. And so he and his colleagues spent New Year’s Eve, 1981, struggling in a raging blizzard on a dangerous ridge in the Tehachapi Pass, battling to get the balking wind turbines up before the new year in order to qualify for that year’s tax credits, which would expire at midnight.

  “As soon as we started turning the turbines on, they started disintegrating,” he said. “The next day we picked up the pieces. We concluded that we’d better get a better technology pretty damn quick.”12

  STURDY DANES

  Dehlsen decided to look for that technology in Europe and set off for Holland. A Danish engineer, Finn Hansen, whose family owned an agricultural-equipment manufacturing company, heard that Dehlsen was about to buy Dutch turbines. He hurriedly flew down to Holland in his small propeller plane, picked up Dehlsen, and flew him back to Denmark, to visit the family business, Vestas.

  A few years earlier, Finn Hansen had decided to put his family company’s skills to work on turbines, building on a Danish interest in wind-generated electricity going back to the end of the nineteenth century. During both world wars, Denmark overcame disruptions to its conventional energy supplies by depending upon winds coming off the sea to generate much of its electricity. After World War II, wind could no longer compete with cheap centrally generated electric power. But the oil crises of the 1970s rekindled the interest. By 1979 Vestas had built its first wind turbine. Other Danish companies were developing their own wind machines. The reborn Danish industry was rooted in agricultural machinery; in fact, a number of the original wind companies were members of the Union of Blacksmiths. The Danish designs emphasized durability, reliability, and ruggedness, characteristics much prized in farm machinery.13