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TODAY Friday 13 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Windmills

I would like to hear from readers who live near wind machines that generate electricity. I would like to learn how they're working and what it's like to be their neighbor.

Long ago, not far away, I was a staff member of the New Alchemy Institute. On our farm on Cape Cod, the combined talents of architects, biologists, and builders produced buildings in which you could grow food year-round without any input of fossil fuels. These buildings were heavily bermed and insulated on the north and glazed with special plastics on the south. The sun provided heat through the glazing that was stored in the soil of terraced gardens and in tall cylinders of water, in which were raised algae-feeding fish.

Those buildings were wonderful in many ways (you can safely assume I had nothing to do with their design or construction). Suffused with light, healthfully moist, and filled with the shapes and smells of plants. They had problems, too -- the plastic glazings clouded and cracked, the entrapped fish populations had to be monitored closely, wood rotted -- but all in all, I think that the New Alchemy buildings and others like them demonstrated that, technically speaking, it's quite practicable to build enclosed spaces in temperate climates that can provide human inhabitants comfortable protection from the weather without burning carbon. Mind you, that's not the same as saying people want to live in such buildings -- burning carbon is cheap, easy, and reliable -- but that's another question.

Even back in those old days (1978 - 1980), we liked computers and light bulbs enough to know that electricity also had to be provided. We knew about, and deployed, solar photovoltaics, but they were expensive and not easy to integrate into the architecture. The answer, we thought, was wind-generated electricity. We thought that the good world of the future would consist of small social units (families to tribes) providing most of what they needed on-site, and so we assumed that the backyard windmill was the electricity provider of choice. We also liked the way that the verticality of a windmill complemented the earth-hugging buildings. Very pretty picture.

The problem was that windmills were (are) machines exposed to the elements. Either they have to be astonishingly durable or people who know how to fix them have to be nearby. Back then, we couldn't find the astonishingly durable models, and we couldn't afford to pay the people to fix them. One of our number, a liberal-arts graduate from Hampshire College, taught himself to tend our temperamental machines, but then he went off to New Hampshire to set up the Stonyfield Yogurt enterprise (go, Gary!), and the rest of us couldn't match his initiative. The windmills languished. I've heard much the same story from other back-to-the-land organizations of that era.

So, please tell me, what's happened since then? Does the world have a Model T windmill yet? I read yesterday that wind machines now produce more than seven percent of the electricity consumed in Denmark. Are they deployed in single units, as we romantic Jeffersonians thought, or in wind-farm clusters? Are they reliably self-maintaining? What is the annualized windspeed that tells you if a given site makes economic sense over, say, a five-year period? I've also read that windmills often stir controversy with neighbors who don't like the way they look. Andrew Lloyd Weber is trying to stop wind generator construction near his English country estate (he can always retaliate by broadcasting the score of Evita over loudspeakers). Is his a typical response? How do non-fanatics regard the machines?

First-person accounts only, please. If you have windmill experience, please tell me about it. Chances are good we'll post what you send. This is a technology I want to like very much. But not if I have to fix it.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Luckily, those of you who are not yet expert in the wind biz have a nearby place to start an autodidact campaign. Way out west, in Butte, Montana, sits the National Center for Appropriate Technology and the man the Center relies on for sound judgments on Renewable Energy. His name is Jeff Birkby and he's right here at High Fives.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

2/12: Stuart Eizenstat's Smart Bomb
2/11: Alligator in the Coal Mine
2/10: Inconvenient Public Opinion
2/9: Remember Penn Station
2/6: Adam Smith and Automobile Efficiency
2/5: Clean Water, Naturally
2/4: Roll, Storms, Roll
2/3: Land Purchase Fever
2/2: Groundhog Day in the Persian Gulf
1/30: Trees and Hormones
1/29: Things To Come (2)
1/28: Things To Come
1/27: 'Bye, 'Bye Brazil
1/26: Jaywalking and Jaydriving
1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish

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