Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [107]
Goodwin’s point is well noted. Two modern economic historians have estimated that wind power, mostly tapped by boats, was the dominant energy source for most of the nineteenth century. In 1850, by their figuring, windpower did more work helping distributors drag goods around the States than waterwheels and coal combined.13 Wyman was swayed. He set up Putnam with a subordinate company, the Vermont Power Service—and launched the project into the big leagues.
With someone to buy the power they hoped to generate, the project soon found a financial backer—the S. Morgan Smith Company. Wyman happened to know that with the nation’s rivers damn near dammed up, the hydroelectric turbine company was looking to expand into a fresh market. They already knew how to do water—why not add the air, too? When all was said and done, the largish family business headquartered in York, Pennsylvania, spent $1.25 million, or upward of $15 million in today’s money.14
With financial backing and Bush’s imprimatur, Putnam started to work the MIT network to find star engineers. He had been introduced to E. N. Fales, who was one of the first people to start thinking about how to apply the knowledge that engineers had gained from prop planes to the windmill. Fales’s key advance was to replace the multibladed mill with two simple, propeller-style blades. That let the blades spin faster—six to ten times faster—which created way more power. By the early ’20s Fales was already writing that his design enabled “competition with gasoline farm-lighting plants.”15
These advances in aerodynamic knowledge convinced Putnam that if he just took Fales’s design, made it big, and hooked it to the grid, he could generate electricity as cheaply as coal or hydropower. He was apparently quite persuasive. His next hire was John Wilbur, head of civil engineering at MIT, to serve as the project’s chief engineer.
“MEAGER AND UNCERTAIN” DATA
The construction of such a novel machine was lousy with difficulties, some internal but many external. The exigencies of a country preparing for war caused delays and trouble, but the desire to finish and monetize the turbine ahead of the fast-approaching war appears to have accelerated the pace of R&D beyond what prudence would have dictated.
Evaluating the performance of designs was also painstakingly slow because the engineers of the time lacked the computers to do tough math quickly. Cal-Tech aeronautical engineer Homer J. Stewart was assigned to calculate the effectiveness of different rotor designs. In a 1982 interview he recalled the computational process. “I’d compute the designs, step-by-step numerical integration for hours on end. It was the sort of thing that my pocket computer can now do,” Stewart said. “It’s a fairly messy problem; on the pocket computer it takes an hour’s time to compute one power output at a given wind speed for a given design to a reasonable precision. It took weeks in those days.”16 Today, a similar problem could be completed nearly instantly on a MacBook, allowing engineers to optimize the design by running millions of calculations.
Their effort also suffered from gaping data holes. Gathering engineering-grade environmental data is just flat-out difficult—a lot harder than the task for coal plant engineers, who get to design a structure and measure inside that. Wind engineers have to deal with natural conditions. Their work is in situ: It’s out in the wild. Now we have hundreds of weather stations to record precise information about the wind—and historical data stretches back decades. Wind maps show the average movement of air at excellent resolution. New sensors and computer models have transformed the field of aerodynamics, too. And even with all this, getting just the right placement for wind turbines and farms is still difficult.
Back then, the information available to Putnam was “meager and uncertain.