CHAPTER ONE CATCHING THE WIND FRIEND OR FOE Ask someone that question about the wind and the answer will likely depend on the conditions Wind can be a cooling breeze on a hot day Or it can come with gale force as a tornado or hurricane that destroys homes and whole cities Sometimes it’s helpful carrying seeds through the air to be pollinated Other times it blows with such strength that it can remove an entire layer of soil that farmers need for crops Wind is invisible and uncontrollable But it’s everywhere And it doesn’t cost a thing The wind is full of power if people can only catch it Most seed-producing plants and crops around the world rely on anemophily or wind pollination 6
Ancient Egyptians Greeks and Romans used wind for transportation The wind currents over the seas filled the sails of boats On land people harnessed the wind for other jobs Early windmills provided power for tasks that were tiresome for people to do by hand such as grinding grain or pumping water Windmills were at work in Persia present-day Iran by about the seventh century A D The machines then spread east to Asia and north to Europe The four-pointed Dutch windmill is a famous image These brightly painted windmills served as landmarks and gathering places They needed to be tended all the time so sometimes people even lived inside them Historians believe that between the 14th and 19th centuries wind provided about 25 percent of Europe’s energy needs Wind energy powered much of Europe before the Industrial Revolution but it didn’t take off in the Americas for a long time In 1883 a writer for the magazine Scientific American noted It seems incomprehensible that such a ready and potent agent the wind should escape practical use so completely as it does That lack of use was about to change By the turn of the century As shown on this Polish stamp ancient Greek ships used both oars and wind power to sail 7
Windmills have historically provided energy to farmers and other rural residents farmers all over the U S were installing windmills that pumped water for cattle However wind never became a large source of energy like coal or oil In 193 6 the U S government instituted the Rural Electrification Act to bring electricity to people who lived farther away from cities The effort relied on fossil fuels effectively putting smaller wind companies out of business In fact to get on the new power grid farmers were required to stop using wind Wind energy made a comeback in the 1970s In 1973 oil suppliers in the Middle East hiked up their prices causing shortages everywhere Nations started scrambling to find new sources of energy One candidate was nuclear power but it was risky and controversial Henrik Stiesdal a pioneer in developing wind technology in Denmark returned home from traveling in 1976 to find that anti-nuclear activists had banded together to build a homemade wind turbine He remembers For me it was a very big inspiration I thought Well we can do it If we want it enough we can do it The U S also made a push for wind power Because developing wind power sources cost more money than it made businesses were encouraged with tax credits to pursue the technology The early 1980s saw a wind rush in California Instead of just a few windmills installed on family farms 8
With growing public awareness of fossil fuel pollution people are looking to the skies for renewable options wind farms consisting of hundreds of giant turbines were sprawled across great distances Several projects were built from 1981 to 1985 However the boom was short-lived In 1985 the tax credits expired The wind didn’t die down but the industry did This brief experiment had not lasted long enough to work out all the kinks Many wind turbines were poorly built and broke easily In addition the oil crisis had passed by then and prices came back down Renewable energy didn’t seem as important By the 1990s the tide had shifted again The cost of oil and natural gas started to creep up and many more scientists began to realize that fossil fuels were causing a lot of environmental problems Emissions polluted the air and contributed to global warming It was time to give wind another chance Wind power is distinct from solar power but they are related Today the term solar power refers to energy that is captured directly from the sun Wind power though comes indirectly from the sun First the sun heats the air That warm air rises and cooler air flows into the space underneath The movement of 9
