Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [105]
Over the next two years the turbine ran through hundreds of hours of testing, often pumping power onto the electrical grid. The project’s engineers were sure that, technically, the machine worked. Unluckily, a bearing broke and the war prevented its replacement until 1945. By spring of that year, with the war waning, it was back up and running.
When running at maximum speed, the turbine could produce 1,600 horsepower—that’s 1,250 kilowatts. It would take fifteen thousand human beings working hard to generate that much energy. Just imagine them spread out in the blue-green valley beneath Perry, pulling on ropes or pushing rocks up the hill, a platoon of Sisyphuses—or, more realistically, slaves. Harnessing nature has its benefits.2
Understanding how ridiculously grand the project really was is important. Its scale—ten times as powerful as the very largest turbine and a thousand times more powerful than most of them—was almost unimaginable. To plan an equivalently ambitious project now would mean setting out to build a machine that pumped out sixty-five megawatts. This was a small group of inventors attempting to make a leap into a different future through breakthrough technology.
And the strange thing is that they succeeded.
Time concluded its article on the project with a hopeful half-prediction, “New England ranges may someday rival Holland as a land of windmills.” This was, after all, merely the prototype for whole lines of turbines.
Perry’s job was to watch over the turbine and make sure that everything ran smoothly. The turbine had built-in methods for “coning” out of the wind to keep it from spinning too quickly, but it seemed like a good idea to have someone around . . . just in case. During the day, he could stand behind the rotating blades in a flannel shirt and a hardhat, staring out at the unspoiled expanses of rural New England. Old films show the blades—the bomber wing look-alikes—beating a rhythmic, majestic whomp-whomp right in front of his face. But it was dark just then—three in the morning. He would not have seen much out there.3
Atop the rural Vermont mountaintop known as Grandpa’s Knob, aloft in that tower with wings, Perry didn’t know that the grandest wind experiment in the first few millennia of human existence was about to fail. For ten more minutes, he would be sitting atop the world’s most famous evidence of renewable energy’s bright future.
The unprecedented project was built up from nothing, practically conjured by Palmer Putnam, an MIT-trained geologist with no formal education or experience in wind power. He was a fascinating character, a clean energy entrepreneur seventy years ahead of his time. Vannevar Bush, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s science adviser, had high praise for this engineer-of-all-trades, calling Putnam a “go-getter” in his autobiography and noting that he “had some of the characteristics of the best type of promoter in industry. He was well liked by men with lots of drive and often disliked by those with less.”4 His friends called him Put, after the Greatest Generation traditions of the day.
Before his project, windmills had just pumped water for farmers in the boonies or charged the batteries of rural radios so they could pick up the AM stations that brought news across the lonely, whistling prairies. The people who sold windmills marketed to ranchers and farmers; their advertisements appeared in magazines like American Thresherman and Farm Power, Agricultural Technology, and Successful Farming. They were symbols of autonomy from the centralized systems of the electrical industry. They were simple and Western and rugged.5
But that’s not