"Industrial wind energy is a symptom of, not a solution to, our energy problems"
Eric Rosenbloom, National Wind Watch
Windmills had been been in use for some 2,000 years before, in 1888, Charles F. Brush (1849-1929) linked a wind-powered turbine and a generator to provide power for the lights on his estate in Ohio, The 144- bladed rotor was based on wind-driven water pumps, and bore little resemblance to today's turbines.
Perhaps more familiar would be the turbines developed by Paul LaCour who, from 1891, developed wind power as a means of supplying farms and villages in his native Denmark. His four-bladed turbines could provide up to 25 kilowatts of power and were generating in their hundreds by 1910. In the early twentieth century, propeller-like turbines with only two or three blades appeared, in 1931 the first large- scale turbine, a 100-kilowatt Russian device, was connected directly into an existing power supply network. Despite its consistent performance, the Russians abandoned the experiment at the start of World War II.
As fossil fuel supplies dwindle in the twenty-first century, huge wind farms have sprung up on land and offshore around the world. However, there are fierce debates about the commercial viability of such wind farms and whether their energy savings actually outweigh the ecological damage they have done to the rural landscape and wildlife.
