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Kaleberg's avatar

When I think of wind power, I remember the 1970s human powered flight challenges. Human powered aircraft had to be light, large, strong, flexible and make optimal use of limited power. The 1970s was the start of a materials revolution. There were all those lightweight fabrics and metals, low friction plastic bearings, power permanent magnets and sophisticated computer systems to design and control it all.

When I was in college, my class was asked why the ancient Romans couldn't build integrated circuits. They are largely made of silicon, something the Romans used all the time in the form of silicon dioxide in stone and sand. We wound up developing a technology tree with existing technology depending on earlier technologies and it was a pretty deep tree between 1970s era integrated circuits and anything the Romans could make.

Just as turbines had to wait for the materials and machining revolutions of the 19th century to play out, cost effective wind power had to rely on dozens, even hundreds of technologies. Looking at the computational technology alone, my personal viewpoint, is revealing. For a long time, even back in the 1990s, simulating the air flow around a helicopter blade was considered a distant reach for super-computing. Now it's standard practice. The finite element method for the support structures was being widely adopted, for example, to minimize materials in aluminum soda cans, but that wasn't the kind of thing one could do on a PC.

Then you have to deal with the compact generator, the blade control, and the ability to produce synchronized AC power. That meant new magnetic materials, new approaches to generator design, solid state power circuitry and what I can only call improved wind science. All told, it's been a pretty amazing trip.

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norstadt's avatar

Interesting that wind power is so cheap, but electricity so expensive in Europe and renewables-heavy US states.

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