Wind Energy in America: A History

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wind Energy in America: A History* Peter Karnøe (bio) Wind Energy in America: A History. By Robert W. Righter. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Pp. xxi+361; illustrations, notes, index. $34.95. This book offers a rich empirical narrative history of wind energy in America. It focuses on the electricity-producing windmill from around 1850 to the 1990s. It is written out of Robert W. Righter’s strong environmental concern with Americans’ domination in the big energy banquet of this century. It is guided by Righter’s implicit questions: Why don’t Americans use wind energy despite this resource’s abundance? Why did America fail to exploit the opportunities to develop and stabilize the use of wind energy despite many technological projects in the last century, including pioneering regulatory frameworks set up in the 1970s and 1980s and California’s global leadership in the diffusion and use of wind energy? Righter’s answers are not explicitly theory driven, and the narrative is more useful than the implicit theory based on power games and Darwinian economics. The narrative shows diverse actors involved in supporting or criticizing wind energy, the ideas and motives of inventors, governmental [End Page 417] regulators, users, utilities, and related social groups, the shifting understandings that different groups held about wind energy, what it is good for and what not, and how those understandings changed over time with changes in contexts. The book is divided into two parts. The first part covers the early history of the human use of wind energy back to 644 a.d., and the second covers the development of modern wind power in America after the first energy crisis in 1973. Each part deals with two subthemes: from what technological projects did wind turbines in America emerge, and how did the regulatory frameworks of the energy markets evolve and affect the use of wind energy in America? Righter gives a sufficient idea of technical design criteria but does not go deeper into technical details or perceived technical problems of inventors, especially in the period after 1970. It remains a mystery why American technological competencies failed so miserably to deliver a workable wind turbine despite large government R&D and market subsidies. Righter’s narrative illustrates the evolution of wind turbine technology and its relations to coevolving attitudes toward soft and hard energy paths, especially when emerging environmental problems and the energy crisis of 1973 created a context for a renewed concern for wind power. Righter gives fine insight to the politics, concerns, and criteria when new technological projects were born and new regulatory frameworks created. He dramatizes the confrontations as the Little Guys (hippies, green environmentalists, and independent innovators) against the Giants, the big guys from utilities, NASA/DOE, and large aerospace R&D contractors. Righter concludes that American wind power lost out despite the once fast-growing home market due to power games and Darwinian economics. He stresses that economic considerations cannot be ignored and that wind must compete against traditional measurements of energy costs. Yet he does not address how these economic criteria came to be perceived as natural, legitimate, and dominant in the United States, but not everywhere else. More recently, why did the United States and Europe have different views in Kyoto? Shall we wait until evolution by itself shifts environmental concern for simple economics? The weakness of this fine book is that there is no ongoing juxtaposition of theory, explanation, and factual narrative. However, the book provides an empirical richness that one can usefully reinterpret through such lenses as Pinch and Bijker’s social construction of technology model and Callon’s dynamic actor-network theory. These models can conceptualize the constitutive dynamics of the evolutionary process of wind energy and help explain why it never really prospered in the American context, in contrast to Denmark, for instance, where innovators succeeded with another recipe for innovation and became global leaders. Analysis could further be linked to such concepts as technological frames, technological styles, and heterogeneous [End Page 418] engineering in communities of practice. Instead of Darwinian economics or power games, we would have been better served by looking at processes that bring our attention to...