Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [110]
But in 1945 war-time habits were still in play. The deprivation it brought to industrialized countries forced them to use energy and materials with a care that they have never approached again. And still the country was 500,000 tons short of coal, prompting confrontations between coal mine operators and workers about how to pick up the slack. There was a need, or at least room, for alternative energy sources.
Wind, it turned out, would not be one of those sources for another forty years.
At exactly 3:10 a.m. on March 26, 1945, after more than 1,100 hours of operation, the Smith-Putnam turbine experienced an epic failure. One of the turbine’s blades broke clean off and went sailing 750 feet through the night. The force of the breaking blade threw Perry off his feet as the unbalanced machine shook like the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise when it was under attack. Putnam dramatized the scene:
Suddenly he found himself on his face on the floor, jammed against one wall of the control room. He got to his knees and was straightening up to start for the control panel, when he was again thrown to the floor. He collected himself, got off the floor, hurled his solid 225 pounds over the rotating 24-inch main shaft, reached the controls, and brought the unit to a full stop in about 10 seconds by rapidly feathering what was found to be the remaining blade of the turbine.23
A photo taken the next day shows the enormous blade on the ground, men walking and crawling near it like the Lilliputians around Gulliver. The caption reads simply, “The Blade That Failed.”
THE BLADE THAT FAILED AND THE PROJECT THAT DIDN’T
Seeing catastrophic failure in the Smith-Putnam turbine is easy. What went wrong is as obvious as a seventy-five-foot blade lying on the ground. The turbine’s record, however, was a mixed bag for renewable energy advocates in political debate. On the one hand, the existence of the turbine made wind power seem more real as a large-scale source of electrical power than it ever had been before. On the other hand, at the 1951 Congressional hearings to provide increased wind power funding, one historian notes, some “legislators considered Putnam’s blade failure to have proved the whole endeavor a washout.”24 The machine’s failure played right into the hands of those committed to other forms of electrical production—fossil, atomic, or solar. Putnam himself later advocated the use of atomic and solar power to replace fossil fuels in the long run, devoting only a few dismissive sentences to the potential of wind power in a sweeping energy analysis he wrote for the Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1950s.
But for the wind engineers who discovered Putnam in later years, the turbine wasn’t a failure. “Interest in developing large wind-electric generating systems in the United States was stimulated primarily by one man, Palmer C. Putnam,” a crisis-induced 1974 NASA research report on alternative energy found. Even though his turbine didn’t ultimately succeed, he left a remarkable base that was really the only thing that the inventors of the ’60s and ’70s had to build on.25
Putnam failed well because he created data on which inventors could build the future. In a startlingly progressive move, the company that bankrolled the project assigned their patents to the public domain and asked Putnam to write a book detailing what happened so that others could continue the work. They made the wind data they had gathered from the region public. This turns out to have been immensely helpful for later generations.
Without the unique experiment, nothing would have been known about large-scale systems. Less data equals more risk—and risk is expensive in big power plant projects. By gathering data on what did and didn’t work, Putnam saved enormous amounts of time and money for subsequent researchers. Now an entire industry