Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - All About Wind Power

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

For thousands of years, humans have been using the power of the wind to do useful work. At first, the wind was just used for sailing ships, but eventually, the wind's power was harnessed for mundane tasks like milling grain and pumping water.  Unlike many ancient energy sources, wind power is still used today, and it has become a major source of electrical generation. Learn more about how humans conquered the wind and made it useful on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast. Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For thousands of years, human beings have been using the power of the wind to do useful work. At first, the wind was just used for sailing ships, but eventually the wind's power was harnessed to do mundane tasks like milling grain and pumping water. And unlike many ancient energy sources, wind power is still used today, and it has become a major source of electrical generation. Learn more about how humans conquered the wind and made it useful on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The wind is something that humans have dealt with for as long as there have been humans. Outside, perhaps drying meat and hides after a hunt, there's no evidence of Paleolithic people doing anything to harness the power of. the wind. The first real evidence that we can find in the archaeological record of humans using wind goes back about 7,000 years to ancient Egypt, where we found the earliest sailboats. These early sailboats

were very simple, but they provided power to move up and down the Nile River and later along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. About 5,000 years ago, we know that early Austronesian people also use sails. These were the ancestors of the Polynesians and Micronesians who probably originated from the island of Taiwan. Despite the existence of warships with teams of oarsmen propelling the vessel, usually just for speed in combat, the sail was by far the most popular means of propulsion for thousands of years. Despite how popular and widespread sailing had become, there was shockingly little evidence for wind power being harnessed for anything else. The Babylonian king Hamarabi had reportedly planned on building a wind-powered water pump to power his irrigation network

in the Fertile Crescent. But if he did ever build it, it never caught on. Around 300 BC, the Persians were using wind to power grain mills. This was believed to be the first example in history of wind being used for such a purpose. The Persian windmills looked very odd if you're familiar with modern windmills. They were horizontal, so they didn't require gears to transmit rotational energy in a different direction, and it also didn't use sails or veins. The windmill was just a vertical wooden pole with horizontal poles sticking out of it. It would then be placed in a brick tower with an opening that would channel air into it.

The lack of sails was rather astonishing, considering that sails were also used on ships to catch the wind. One of the first people to build a practical device to run a machine was someone whose name has appeared on this show before, Hero of Alexandria, the exact same person who also created the first crude steam-powered device. He created a wind-powered organ that could play music. As with his steam engine, it was really more of a toy, but it did show that wind power could be harnessed to do something useful. The Romans did almost nothing with wind power other than sailing ships. And this seems rather odd, given that they did a lot of grain milling and pressing of olives, both of which are tasks that use rotational energy.

The best reason I've come across was that the Roman use of slave labor stunted their technical development. They probably could have developed windmills, but why bother when you can just throw cheap human labor at a problem? The first widespread use of wind didn't really develop until around the 8th century in what is today Iran and Afghanistan. They created a better version of the Babylonian horizontal windmill, but it was used to pump water. These horizontal wind pumps used sails to power the rotation of the main axle, vastly increasing their power compared to their ancient versions. These Persian wind pumps rapidly spread across the Islamic world and eventually to India and China. The rotational energy they created was also easily adopted for the milling of grain as well. The horizontal windmill arrived in southern Spain

around the early 11th century via the caliphate of Cordoba. The horizontal windmill was simple, but it had serious problems. Given its orientation, there was a limit to how much wind it could catch. The wind would blow the blades or sails on one side, and then move the blades into the wind on the other side. The next big innovation in windmill design was the vertical windmill. And this is a windmill that looks like the windmills that you're familiar with. The blades all faced the wind and delivered much more energy than horizontal. windmills. The first vertical windmills appeared in the 12th century, and the first known vertical

windmill was in the village of Weedley in Yorkshire, England. This was a huge improvement in windmill design, so much so that it's persisted for almost 900 years. However, there was still a small problem. It weren't great if the wind happened to be hitting the blades head on, but what happened if the wind changed directions and now is coming in from the side or even from behind? The solution to this problem was the development of the postmill. As the name suggested, the post mill had everything mounted on a single vertical pole. This allowed the entire apparatus to be rotated to always face the wind. The farmer who operated the windmill would just have to push a giant handle on the outside the windmill to turn it.

You can still see post mills scattered about Europe today, and many of them are still functioning. The post mill then led to the development of the hollow post mill, where the center pole was hollow, so a drive shaft could be put inside. This allowed the windmill to turn and still move whatever machinery was attached to it at the bottom. The 13th century saw much of this innovation in windmills in Europe. This was the high technology of the period. Turning an entire windmill was still pretty inefficient, however,

and it also limited the size of how big a windmill could be if you had to turn the entire edifice. This led to the creation of the tower windmill. And if you've seen old windmills in Europe, this is probably the type you were seeing. Tower windmills were built on masonry towers, allowing them to be much larger and taller than post-windmills. The key to the tower windmill was that only the top of the windmill connected to the blades had to be rotated. That meant a single person could move a much larger windmill and do it inside the tower regardless of weather conditions.

Perhaps the biggest user of windmills in Europe were the Dutch. In fact, windmills were so ubiquitous in the Netherlands that they have become the country's symbol. The reason for the extensive use of windmills by the Dutch was to pump water. A great deal of agricultural land in the Netherlands is below sea level. In order to keep the land productive, it has to be pumped almost constantly. This necessitated an extensive network of windmills to keep the fields, known as polders, from flooding. The Dutch also modified the tower windmill design and created what's known as a smock windmill. This is basically the same thing as a tower windmill, except above a short masonry foundation, everything is made of wood.

And this was to make the windmill lighter so it didn't sink into the very soft ground of the polder. If you're ever in the Netherlands and want to see how the Dutch windmill system operated, there is a historical site outside of Rotterdam called Kinderdyke. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it's easily accessible via water taxi from the Rotterdam City Center. This was pretty much the state of windmills entering the Industrial Revolution. A windmill was usually inferior to a water wheel simply because water flowed almost continuously, but they were still very common throughout Europe. Peak windmill probably occurred around 1850,

when there were 200,000 windmills in Europe and 500,000 water wheels. The development of the steam engine made the windmill mostly obsolete. Some places may have used them if they still had them, but machines were far more powerful and efficient for whatever you wanted a windmill to do. There was still occasional windmill uses in remote areas. On the Great Plains in the United States, windmills would often be set up to pump water for cattle.

An estimated 6 million of these small windmills were installed across the United States. However, just as machines rendered windmills obsolete, a new technology emerged. Electricity. All you needed to do to create electricity was to turn an electric dynamo. This was usually done with water or steam, but it could also be done with wind. The first windmill to generate electrical power was built in 1887 by Professor James Blythe of Anderson College of Glasgow, Scotland. He used his hand-built windmill to generate power for his cottage on the seashore.

He actually offered to power the streetlights of the nearby village of Mary Kirk, Scotland, but the people there declined the offer as they thought electricity was the work of the devil. Throughout the 20th century, wind-powered electrical generation remained very niche. It was mostly used in places that couldn't get access to the electrical grid. It wasn't until 1941 that the first megawatt electrical windmill was built. It was erected on Grandpa's Knob Mountain in Castleton, Vermont. Unfortunately, it only operated for 1,100 hours before one of the blades broke, and it was never fixed due to wartime rationing,

and it was to remain the largest electrical windmill in the world for 48 years. What really changed with respect to wind-powered electrical generation was the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s. Energy prices rose, and people began looking for cleaner energy alternatives. Moreover, technical changes also made wind power far more feasible than it was before. The key to creating cost-effective electricity with wind is scale, and when it comes to wind, bigger is better. The reason has to do with the area covered by a windmill versus the size of its blades. As a windmill turns, it's being turned by wind flowing through a circle, the size of the rotating blades.

And if you remember back to your geometry course, the area of a circle is pi times the rate is squared. So for every increment a windmill blade increases in size, the power it can generate is roughly increased by the square of the length of the blade. The bigger a windmill gets, the more efficient it becomes. And this is the exact same reason why it's always more cost effective to buy the largest pizza possible. On top of the efficiencies of size, the higher up you go, the faster the wind usually is, so there's more energy to capture. The problem is, the bigger a windmill gets, the heavier it becomes. The angular velocity of the tips of the blade start moving incredibly fast. Pretty much any metal is too heavy to use for the creation of massive

windmill blades. The development of synthetic materials such as fiberglass and carbon fiber allowed for extremely large, strong, and lightweight windmill blades to be produced. The other big innovation was putting gearboxes in the turbines. Just like you would switch gears on your bicycle when going a pill, so too did gears allow for windmills to adjust the speed of the turbine in different wind conditions. The critical factor in electrical generation from wind is obviously wind. Not everywhere on earth has an equal amount of wind. The Great Plains has an enormous amount of wind potential, which is why you see so many wind turbines in states like Texas, Iowa, and North Dakota. Likewise, many coastal regions have a great deal of wind as well. This is behind

the move to create offshore wind farms, which would be located potentially several miles away from. land. With higher winds and no people, you can set up almost as many as you'd like. Electrical generation from wind has become big business. Today, the global production of wind power is estimated to be over 600 gigawatts. The country that produces the most wind power is China, followed by the United States, Germany, India, and Spain. The world's largest wind turbine, as of the time I am recording this, is the General Electric Halidai X turbine outside of Rotterdam. It stands 260 meters or 853 feet tall and has blades that are 107 meters or 351 feet long. Each blade is longer than a football field.

It can produce by itself between 12 to 14 megawatts of electricity. Unlike solar power, the challenges for wind power are mostly engineering, not advances in material science. The big problem with wind power is the obvious one that has plagued since its inception. The wind doesn't always blow. When the wind is blowing, wind power actually works pretty good, but when it doesn't blow, it doesn't work at all. This is why, unless you can create an enormous amount of energy storage, wind power can only contribute to an electrical system and not run it entirely. There are other issues facing wind power as well, including noise, birds that are killed by rotating blades, and disposal problems with blades that have been retired. Nonetheless, the future of wind power looks pretty good.

More offshore wind farms are under development. There will soon be wind turbines that produce up to 17 megawatts of power, and the cost of wind power is projected to drop by anywhere from a third to a half over the next 10 to 20 years. And that isn't even considering the high cost of alternatives such as natural gas and oil. Wind power is one of the only ancient sources of energy that's still regularly used today. Through centuries of incremental improvements and innovation, the technology used to pump water in ancient Persia

is now also used to provide electricity to people's homes. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day,

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