Comment: thought was a interesting article and here we 30 something years later still not changing energy needs, oil, nuke plants still leading the way with their greed, come on America, we need True Green Energy, Wind, Solar, Tide, Thermal - NO NUKE POWERS, NO URANIUM MINING!!!Published on May 17, 2009 in environmental technologies.
The article below appeared in a 1973 issue of “Forest notes,” as well as the Waterville Valley “Wig Wag.” While a quarter century has passed, Hans’ story is as relevant ever. Why didn’t we listen then?…
Some people are given to day-dreaming. I am one of them. My latest daydream had to do with the fire tower on top of Mt. Osceola and a chat I had with that old lady (like ships and railroad engines, a fire tower is a “she”).
You look unhappy, I said to her.
I am, said she. People think I am useless. They don’t need me anymore. And yet I could be useful. Not by watching out for forest fires — airplanes do a better job of that nowadays. They have wings. Now, if I had wings…
Good heavens, I said, you don’t want wings to fly away with?
O no! not that kind of wings, but wings such as windmills have. I could be a WINDMILL.
A windmill? What for? Windmills went out of fashion fifty years ago.
Some fashions have a come-back, she said. 1 could be a modern windmill with big aerodynamic wings. I would drive a generator and produce hundreds of kilowatts of electricity. Clean, too: no fuel to foul up the air. And FREE, almost. No costs except for construction, amortization, and maintenance.
You talk like an engineer, or an economist, or both, I said.
Well, I have lots of time, so I keep busy solving problems: science, technology, ecology, and so on. Take ENERGY, for instance. What you people mainly use for energy is FOSSIL FUEL: oil, coal, natural gas. It’s all getting terribly expensive. Worse: there will be less and less of it as you need more and more, for more and more people. No end in sight.
And the POLLUTION! Strip-mining … oil spills … it’s a nightmare! You can’t keep this small planet of yours livable that way. Besides, fossil fuel is a “nonrenewable resource.” Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. Using up fossiI fuel means living off your CAPITAL. Very bad practice, my dear. What has become of the famous Yankee thrift?
I know it’s a problem, I said, but do you have a solution?
I do indeed, It’s the WIND.
I know it’s a problem, I said, but do you have a solution?
I do indeed, It’s the WIND.
People consider wind outmoded as an energy source — it’s just good enough for recreation, for small sailing boats. That’s a mistake. Wind is the greatest natural energy source on earth, ready for use, if you will only put your minds to it. It’s INEXHAUSTIBLE, and it doesn’t pollute.
Remember: WIND drove your New England Clipper Ships across the oceans. They could make 18 knots — not bad even compared with modern oil-driven freighters. About the same time — around 1850 — there were thousands of windmills in the U. S., producing almost a billion and a half horsepowers a year. As recently as fifty years ago the windmills on your farms were still pumping water and driving electric generators, untill the· Rural Electrification Program (based mainly on fossil fuel) made them expendable.
Of course you’ll say: wind is unreliable it isn’t always blowing. What then?
Well, the answer is you STORE ENERGY. You store it while the wind blows, so you have it when it doesn’t. So far there have been mainly two ways to store energy: storage batteries like the ones in your car; or storage reservoirs: you pump water into a reservoir while the wind blows, and release the water to drive turbine generators when it stops. Both ways have drawbacks: batteries are not too efficient, water may be scarce, and reservoirs are expensive to build. But there is now another way: modern FLYWHEELS.
Read about Flywheels in the December, 1973, issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. It’s fabulous what ultra-modern flywheels can do. Traditional flywheels are clumsy and heavy. The modern ones are light they substitute whirling speed for weight. They can store energy several times as economically as batteries, and they can be made to run for weeks, even months, once they have been set whirling by wind of any other power. Unlike water reservoirs you can put them up anywhere, and they don’t take much space. One can make them so small and light one can install them in a compact electric automobile and make it run 200 miles at 60 m.p.h. on ONE charge.
Sounds incredible, doesn’t it?
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is a trustworthy publication, and so is SMITHSONIAN magazine which carries a fascinating article on WIND POWER, in its
November, 1973, issue: a committee of experts from N. S. F. (National Science Foundation), and from N. A. S. A. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) have figured out that with a major WIND POWER PROGRAM the U. S. could produce, within 25 years or so, the installations to generate 1.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year equal to the total consumed in the whole country in 1970. The people from N. S. F. and N. A. S. A. should know what they are talking about. After all, they are the ones that sent men to the moon.
They suggest huge wind-driven generators, arranged in widely extended GRIDS, so when some of those “super windmills” are becalmed, the others take up the slack. Such arrangement would take care of most of your nation’s energy needs, stretch your dwindling fossil fuel supplies many times over, protect you against blackmail from oil suppliers abroad, and help preserve your environment. Some of those grids could be built on platforms in the ocean, off the
Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with double advantage: sea winds blow strong most of the time, and you could use some of the energy to produce HYDROGEN from sea-water, by electrolsis. That would mean one more way to store energy: hydrogen can drive combustion engines such as automobile motors, and it is a clean fuel; when you burn it the result is WATER.
And one more word about that storage problem: you can avoid it altogether, in many cases, by feeding the electricity produced by windmills into an existing
power system. Remember the giant windmill on “Grandpa’s Knob,” near Rutland, Vermont, more than thirty years ago? It was the largest windmill ever built, 175 feet across. It could, and did, generate 1250 kilowatt of electric energy (enough to light a town) which was fed into the network of the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation: no storage problem, you see! It was an experimental machine which was dismantled after one blade broke off in March, 1945, and war-time shortages made replacement impossible, but it showed how one could use wind energy on a large scale.
To sum it up: what you need is a CRASH PROGRAM TO HARNESS WIND POWER. I’d be glad to help if I can.
It sounds convincing, I said, but I have three questions: 1) how about ATOMIC ENERGY; 2) in the daily papers one hardly ever reads about WIND as energy source: Why? 3) if wind power is all that promising, why doesn’t our government take the lead and start a CRASH PROGRAM?
The answers aren’t easy, she said, but I’ll try.
Remember: WIND drove your New England Clipper Ships across the oceans. They could make 18 knots — not bad even compared with modern oil-driven freighters. About the same time — around 1850 — there were thousands of windmills in the U. S., producing almost a billion and a half horsepowers a year. As recently as fifty years ago the windmills on your farms were still pumping water and driving electric generators, untill the· Rural Electrification Program (based mainly on fossil fuel) made them expendable.
Of course you’ll say: wind is unreliable it isn’t always blowing. What then?
Well, the answer is you STORE ENERGY. You store it while the wind blows, so you have it when it doesn’t. So far there have been mainly two ways to store energy: storage batteries like the ones in your car; or storage reservoirs: you pump water into a reservoir while the wind blows, and release the water to drive turbine generators when it stops. Both ways have drawbacks: batteries are not too efficient, water may be scarce, and reservoirs are expensive to build. But there is now another way: modern FLYWHEELS.
Read about Flywheels in the December, 1973, issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. It’s fabulous what ultra-modern flywheels can do. Traditional flywheels are clumsy and heavy. The modern ones are light they substitute whirling speed for weight. They can store energy several times as economically as batteries, and they can be made to run for weeks, even months, once they have been set whirling by wind of any other power. Unlike water reservoirs you can put them up anywhere, and they don’t take much space. One can make them so small and light one can install them in a compact electric automobile and make it run 200 miles at 60 m.p.h. on ONE charge.
Sounds incredible, doesn’t it?
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is a trustworthy publication, and so is SMITHSONIAN magazine which carries a fascinating article on WIND POWER, in its
November, 1973, issue: a committee of experts from N. S. F. (National Science Foundation), and from N. A. S. A. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) have figured out that with a major WIND POWER PROGRAM the U. S. could produce, within 25 years or so, the installations to generate 1.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year equal to the total consumed in the whole country in 1970. The people from N. S. F. and N. A. S. A. should know what they are talking about. After all, they are the ones that sent men to the moon.
They suggest huge wind-driven generators, arranged in widely extended GRIDS, so when some of those “super windmills” are becalmed, the others take up the slack. Such arrangement would take care of most of your nation’s energy needs, stretch your dwindling fossil fuel supplies many times over, protect you against blackmail from oil suppliers abroad, and help preserve your environment. Some of those grids could be built on platforms in the ocean, off the
Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with double advantage: sea winds blow strong most of the time, and you could use some of the energy to produce HYDROGEN from sea-water, by electrolsis. That would mean one more way to store energy: hydrogen can drive combustion engines such as automobile motors, and it is a clean fuel; when you burn it the result is WATER.
And one more word about that storage problem: you can avoid it altogether, in many cases, by feeding the electricity produced by windmills into an existing
power system. Remember the giant windmill on “Grandpa’s Knob,” near Rutland, Vermont, more than thirty years ago? It was the largest windmill ever built, 175 feet across. It could, and did, generate 1250 kilowatt of electric energy (enough to light a town) which was fed into the network of the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation: no storage problem, you see! It was an experimental machine which was dismantled after one blade broke off in March, 1945, and war-time shortages made replacement impossible, but it showed how one could use wind energy on a large scale.
To sum it up: what you need is a CRASH PROGRAM TO HARNESS WIND POWER. I’d be glad to help if I can.
It sounds convincing, I said, but I have three questions: 1) how about ATOMIC ENERGY; 2) in the daily papers one hardly ever reads about WIND as energy source: Why? 3) if wind power is all that promising, why doesn’t our government take the lead and start a CRASH PROGRAM?
The answers aren’t easy, she said, but I’ll try.
1) You already have quite a few nuclear power plants, and many more under construction, but there are serious problems: HEAT POLLUTION; RADIOACTIVE WASTES; URANIUM getting scarce; danger of sabotage. If a fanatic should succeed in blowing up an atomic plant, you’d have a home-made Hiroshima right in the U.S.
2) The silence about WIND POWER puzzles me too I can’t answer that. Perhaps YOU can do something about it: write a letter to your hometown newspaper, talk about it with your friends.
3) Here things get complicated. You have, as Mark Twain put it, “the best government money can buy,” but that isn’t good enough.
You see, there are billions and billions invested in the Oil, Coal, Gas and Atomic business.
You see, there are billions and billions invested in the Oil, Coal, Gas and Atomic business.
It’s extremely profitable, and many corporations in this field are international. That’s important. In business profits come first. The nation’s interest is a poor second, especially with an international outfit.
You may not like this set-up but there it is. And it’s only human that those who reap enormous profit from this set-up will hold on to it with all their might, which is plenty. When they speak, the government listens.
But nobody owns the wind. There’s no money invested in it, so there is no “wind lobby,” and nobody speaks to the government for the wind. Nobody, that is, except scientists, and to them the government hardly listens. Yet the best of your scientists have people’s interest in mind rather than the profits of giant corporations. In· the present crisis you need scientific advice more than ever, but President Nixon has unfortunately abolished the “White House Office of Scientific Advisors.”
And note this: your government’s budget for 1974 foresees $618 mill ion for atomic research: 170 million for research in fossil fuel - mainly coal; 24 million for research in geothermal and solar energy; and aII of 1.25 million for WIND RESEARCH. To put man on the moon cost 25 billion ~ that’s two thousand times as much as the government plans to spend on wind research …
Speaking of MONEY, the oil-producing countries are wading in cash already. Within a few years they’ll have hundreds of billions of dollars to dispose of — more than they can ever use at home. So what will they do with those billions? You yourself showed them: invest in real estate and industry, not in their own countries but abroad. Right here in the United States, for instance. If you don’t watch out they could, before long, turn your proud independent country into one gigantic “Banana Republic.” How would you like that? How can you avoid it? Not by draining your own fossil fuel (and in the process destroying your environment)nor by building hundreds of nuclear reactors, accumulating unmanageable masses of deadly poisonous radio-active wastes - but by turning back to that old, tested, clean standby: the WIND.
I could go on and one, she said, but let me mention just one more point: not all nations ignore the “wind challenge.” The Germans, for instance, are constructing DYNA-SHIPS, as they call them. Big wind-driven freighters of 17,000 tons, with computer-controlled sails, designed to make 20 knots. They’ll have auxiliary motors, of course, but even so, they’ll use only 5% as much fuel as oil-driven freighters of that size. And now I’ll shut up.
She was as good as her word. Maybe she was a bit single-minded — wind is one way, but not the only one, to replace fossil fuels. Nevertheless, her facts and figures were true, and they set me thinking.
There was a fellow once, so they say, who fought against windmills, on horseback, with his lance. We still call a senseless undertaking “a fight against windmills.” It seems to me we’ll have to do the opposite: we’ll have to fight FOR WINDMILLS!
Sidebar notes from the original article:
H. A. Rey, who wrote this “Chat With A Fire Tower,” is an old·timer. Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1898 and a veteran World War I, he lived for twelve years in Brazil and four years in France before coming to the U. S. in 1940. He is known to millions, here and abroad, as the author-illustrator of the books about a mischievous monkey named CURIOUS GEORGE and of two very popular books on astronomy.
Mr. Rey and his wife Margaret (an author in her own right) live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter and spend their summers in Waterville Valley. From their front yard they can see an abandoned Fire Tower on the top of Mt. Osceola. In days gone by, before airplanes took over, a guard in the tower used to watch out for forest fires, during dry spells.
The Reys are life members of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
http://reycenter.org/?p=4126
But nobody owns the wind. There’s no money invested in it, so there is no “wind lobby,” and nobody speaks to the government for the wind. Nobody, that is, except scientists, and to them the government hardly listens. Yet the best of your scientists have people’s interest in mind rather than the profits of giant corporations. In· the present crisis you need scientific advice more than ever, but President Nixon has unfortunately abolished the “White House Office of Scientific Advisors.”
And note this: your government’s budget for 1974 foresees $618 mill ion for atomic research: 170 million for research in fossil fuel - mainly coal; 24 million for research in geothermal and solar energy; and aII of 1.25 million for WIND RESEARCH. To put man on the moon cost 25 billion ~ that’s two thousand times as much as the government plans to spend on wind research …
Speaking of MONEY, the oil-producing countries are wading in cash already. Within a few years they’ll have hundreds of billions of dollars to dispose of — more than they can ever use at home. So what will they do with those billions? You yourself showed them: invest in real estate and industry, not in their own countries but abroad. Right here in the United States, for instance. If you don’t watch out they could, before long, turn your proud independent country into one gigantic “Banana Republic.” How would you like that? How can you avoid it? Not by draining your own fossil fuel (and in the process destroying your environment)nor by building hundreds of nuclear reactors, accumulating unmanageable masses of deadly poisonous radio-active wastes - but by turning back to that old, tested, clean standby: the WIND.
I could go on and one, she said, but let me mention just one more point: not all nations ignore the “wind challenge.” The Germans, for instance, are constructing DYNA-SHIPS, as they call them. Big wind-driven freighters of 17,000 tons, with computer-controlled sails, designed to make 20 knots. They’ll have auxiliary motors, of course, but even so, they’ll use only 5% as much fuel as oil-driven freighters of that size. And now I’ll shut up.
She was as good as her word. Maybe she was a bit single-minded — wind is one way, but not the only one, to replace fossil fuels. Nevertheless, her facts and figures were true, and they set me thinking.
There was a fellow once, so they say, who fought against windmills, on horseback, with his lance. We still call a senseless undertaking “a fight against windmills.” It seems to me we’ll have to do the opposite: we’ll have to fight FOR WINDMILLS!
Sidebar notes from the original article:
H. A. Rey, who wrote this “Chat With A Fire Tower,” is an old·timer. Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1898 and a veteran World War I, he lived for twelve years in Brazil and four years in France before coming to the U. S. in 1940. He is known to millions, here and abroad, as the author-illustrator of the books about a mischievous monkey named CURIOUS GEORGE and of two very popular books on astronomy.
Mr. Rey and his wife Margaret (an author in her own right) live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter and spend their summers in Waterville Valley. From their front yard they can see an abandoned Fire Tower on the top of Mt. Osceola. In days gone by, before airplanes took over, a guard in the tower used to watch out for forest fires, during dry spells.
The Reys are life members of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
http://reycenter.org/?p=4126
No comments:
Post a Comment