Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
It’s an expensive paperback, $38, and the author expects his readers to be intelligent. But for those willing to invest the money, and read with their brains fully engaged, Peter Musgrove’s Wind Power will return a wealth of knowledge on wind energy.
Once a lecturer in engineering at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, Musgrove finished his career working on wind energy in the private sector. Unlike most American books on wind energy, which are either homebrew manuals or engineering tomes, Wind Power is both an elegant history of wind energy and an analysis of wind energy public policy issues in both Europe and the United States.
Musgrove traces the evolution of horizontal axis wind machines from their roots in medieval England, where they served as labor multipliers for grinding grain, to their present role in generating electricity, reviews vertical axis wind machines in ancient Persia, and explains how three-bladed horizontal axis wind turbines came to dominate today’s wind power industry.
Americans will recognize the pumping windmills that aided agriculture in the Great Plains, the Jacobs wind turbines that brought electricity to farms before Franklin Roosevelt’s rural electrification program extended powerlines to the hinterlands, and the legendary megawatt turbine on Grandpa’s Knob during World War II.
Americans will also learn that although semi-enlightened utility executives dismiss wind power for being “intermittent” and therefore unreliable, wind energy actually is predictable, reliable, and already being successfully integrated into the power grid both here and, especially, in Europe.
Wind energy advocates in the United States should place a copy of Musgrove’s entertaining and enlightening book on the desk of every elected and appointed official, and of every utility executive and board member.