Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [122]
It took another five decades before the first wind tunnels were built for the laboratory testing of winds, and it wasn't until the 1970s that the term wind engineering took on common currency. But now, in the laboratories of the great universities, not just in the faculties of environmental studies but in the schools of engineering and applied sciences, the seductive notion that the wind is essentially free motive power is once again taking root. There is still resistance to the reality of our negative impact on the planet, but the oppressive weight of the evidence is having its effect and experimental notebooks are filling with curious designs that are at once sleekly modern and archaic in conception. The engineers playing with their catamarans in the Little America's Cup are but one example. Sail-assisted ocean steamers had a brief fad in the eighties, and are now reappearing; there are already models capable of reducing fuel burdens by up to 15 percent. More radically, self-fueling vessels are on the drawing boards, driven by hydrogen engines, the hydrogen derived from the sea via wind power. Dirigibles, no longer hydrogen filled but hydrogen propelled, are also reappearing. Aircraft designers are looking to thermal lift, as the birds always have.
The designers haven't gone back to Icarus yet, but it can't be long.
IV
Lower West Pubnico—as opposed to just West Pubnico, or to East Pubnico across the Argyle Sound—is a bucolic little village on Nova Scotia's south shore. I mean, I have lived in bucolic little villages— indeed, I live very near one now—but even by these standards, Lower West Pubnico is very definitely not urban, or industrial. Just a coop store, a fish plant, a rather good restaurant that serves that curious Acadian dish called rappie pie, and half a hundred houses, in a very good state of repair. The inhabitants fish for a living, and they do well, mostly from lobstering, though they seem constantly to complain about the paucity of the pickings. They are, after all this time, still mostly Acadian in origin, and they share names like Amirault, Belliveau, de'Entremont, and d'Eon; no fewer than three pages of Pubnico's six in the telephone directory are filled with d'Entremonts, with first names ranging from Ada to Yvon. The tallest building in town by far is the church. Or at least it was. Now the church steeple is dwarfed by a series of gigantic windmills, or wind turbines. Their blades alone, rotating at a stately pace in the fresh breeze, are longer than the church is high.
You can see these turbines from across the bay at East Pubnico. They don't in fact look very large, or at all intrusive, but this is because you get no sense of their scale. You can keep them in sight as you round the head of the bay and head back down to West Pubnico. You can see them from the village there, but the curious thing is that they don't look any larger, or smaller, than they did around the bay, although you have traveled a good six miles. They actually look like normal windmills from almost ten miles and they take much longer to get to than you would expect. You travel through the village down the highway to Pubnico Point, which is where the locals used to go for romantic trysts, to watch the odd moose in the swamp, or to test out their AT Vs. Finally, the turbines seem to get larger and larger, and if you drive out to where the bulldozers have been grading access roads, you can park your car pretty much underneath the turbine towers (security is not a major concern at Lower West Pubnico). They loom overhead, gigantic and otherworldly, as massive and as unexpected as an office tower in the wilderness. Indeed, these things are the size of an office tower. The hub of the rotor is 257 feet above the ground, and the overall height, blades included, is 389 feet, about the size of a forty-story building. Even the blades are huge, each 262 feet in diameter, 11.62 feet at their widest, with a 13 degree twist. When I first saw them, they were rotating at a leisurely fifteen revolutions a minute, but they are so big that the