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By Root 864 0

and wind vanes mounted on their nacelles, the streamlined huts that contain their electronic guts. These anemometers feed data into a computer that controls where the wind turbine faces and the angle at which its blades meet the wind. It’s a high-tech variation on the old side vanes that used to keep self-regulating American water-pumping windmills facing into the wind during the nineteenth century.38

The anemometers, though, are mounted behind the blades: They know what the wind is like only after it has gone through the business end of the wind machine. Sometimes, the delay between the wind changing and the turbine adapting is a quarter of an hour, which not only sacrifices higher electricity output but can put stress on the out-of-position blades.39

That’s the problem that Catch the Wind, Inc. is trying to solve with its laser-guidance system for wind turbines: the delightfully evil-sounding Vindicator. A laser mounted to the nacelle sends out pulses that travel up to nine hundred feet, bounce off microscopically small particulates, and then return to a fiber optic detector. The LIDAR system is like sonar for the wind: It allows Catch the Wind’s software to create a three-dimensional model of the wind that’s flowing toward the turbine. The data then feeds into the turbine’s control unit. In an early field trial the LIDAR system increased the production of a wind turbine more than 12 percent.40 A similar system developed by the Danish National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy’s Risø wind research unit generated a 5 percent power increase.41

With more than thirty-five gigawatts of wind turbines installed in the United States, a 5 to 12 percent increase in power production would be like adding hundreds of new turbines. Fort Felker, director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Wind Technology Center, thinks that the LIDAR systems may have an even greater impact in reducing operations and maintenance costs for wind farmers. If the LIDAR picks up a freak gust of wind that could damage the turbine, the turbine’s controller could take evasive maneuvers to reduce the strain on the machine.42

The technology is a nearly perfect marriage of three major strains of R&D in the early twenty-first century: clean energy, aerospace, and telecommunications. Catch the Wind’s LIDAR system is an adapted version of a system built for helping helicopter pilots navigate the dusty terrain of Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes economic sense only because the cost of fiber optics and laser diodes were pushed down during the telecom boom of the late twentieth century.43 All that technology, paid for by the military, is now being used to understand how wind blows so that it can be used to make electricity without using natural gas.44

At the same time, a new group of ecologists have begun to argue that the world is so thoroughly dominated by human forces that we’re in a new geological era: the Anthropocene, thanks to the introduction of fossil-fuel burning engines two hundred years ago.45 Pigeons don’t live in biomes but rather in anthromes, as do most other animals. We’re growing up into a world that can no longer divide itself neatly between human-built and natural worlds. Each is becoming more like the other.

Nature is becoming more human managed, but the human systems that produce energy are becoming less destructive and more closely matched to the environment. Sensor-driven environmental awareness provides the means to make the whole world a human workshop, not just a store of natural resources to be exploited. By using data to understand the world, we can profitably adjust our machines to work with the natural energy flows.

In the 1930s Leo Marx identified the impact of the arrival of industrialization in America in his book The Machine in the Garden. The title of his book has been a trope and organizing principle for writing about the American relationship to technology ever since. Seventy years later Adam Rome played on Marx’s formulation with a new theme that explained the rise of the modern environmental movement: The Bulldozer