Paul Gipe
is an author, advocate, and analyst of the renewable energy industry. He has written extensively about the subject for the past four decades, receiving numerous awards for his efforts. Gipe has lectured before groups from Patagonia to Puglia, from Tasmania to Toronto, and from Halifax to Husum. He has spoken to audiences as large as 10,000 and as small as a private presentation for Vice President Al Gore. Gipe is well known for his frank appraisal of the promise and pitfalls of wind energy, including his stinging critiques of Internet wonders and the hustlers and charlatans who promote them. He led the campaign to adapt electricity feed laws to the North American market–the same policy that has stirred a renewable energy revolution in Germany.
Latest Articles by Paul Gipe
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Paul Gipe
EV Range Anxiety Myth Busted by Recurrent
An article by Recurrent’s Liz Najman last winter, EV range anxiety afflicts this group of people the most, busted one of EV’s most persistent myths. The fear that EVs will leave you stranded by the side of the road instills such “range anxiety” in drivers that no one would ever …
Yes siree, we’re serious folk here in Bakersfield, Kern County’s largest city. We strive to be Number 1 in whatever we do. We’re Number 1 in carrots. We produce eight of every ten carrots produced in the USA. We’re Number 1 in California oil production, (13th in US oil production), …
The Deutches Windkraft Musuem (German Windpower Museum) has acquired one of the massive blade tips from the giant German wind turbine Growian, writes Arne Jaeger. Jaeger found the red-painted blade tip on a farm near the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Koog test site where the turbine had been installed by the German government in …
My historical journey into the deep recesses of wind energy took another odd twist yesterday. I was updating my bibliographic entry for a 1946 conference on wind energy in France when I stumbled over this tidbit about electric vehicles.[1] For many in the wind community this may be doubly surprising. …
Because of my critical articles on Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines, Wind Harvest’s Kevin Wolf contacted me with background on what failed in the industry’s mostly widely deployed Darrieus wind turbine: FloWind. In the history of wind energy, no company was more successful in deploying Darrieus or “eggbeater” wind turbines than FloWind. …
Other Articles
Honda will build batteries for electric vehicles in Ontario with financial support from the Canadian and provincial governments under a plan to be announced this week, a source with direct knowledge of the deal told Reuters. Under the terms of the agreement with Ottawa and Ontario, Honda will build batteries, process the cathode materials needed for the batteries, and also assemble electric vehicles in Ontario.
Be polite, plan ahead, don’t jump the line, and other charging tips to ensure harmony.
Frozen pumps. Skyrocketing fuel costs. Plummeting resale values. Here’s why owners who bought into Toyota’s hydrogen dream feel “cheated and misled.”
And thus the tragic legacy of Sam Randazzo and his push to keep Perry and Davis-Besse corruptly on line comes full circle. The biggest bribery scandal in Ohio history skates along the edge of an apocalypse made virtually certain by prolonging operations at two incredibly dangerous money sucking dinosaur nukes, and their 92 dying siblings around the US, 400+ worldwide. We mourn Sam’s passing. We pray his corrupt atomic legacy does not kill the rest of us.
In this post, I crunch through all the data on the carbon footprint of EVs compared to conventional fossil cars. The summary is that, yes, EVs emit less – often one-half to two-thirds less over their lifetime. EVs still emit less when the battery is produced in countries that rely heavily on coal. And, this is true, regardless of whether you’re thinking about buying a new car, or a second-hand one. As the world moves towards lower-carbon electricity, the emissions of EVs will fall even more. When run on renewables or nuclear, the footprint of EVs could be tiny.
Batteries’ domination is likely to be extended as the money pouring into research and infrastructure addresses questions of range and charging times. Compared with that flood of investment, hydrogen is a trickle. Hydrogen’s advocates now face the question of whether they can build profitable businesses in longer-distance, heavy-duty road transport. They need an answer soon on where they will source enough green, cheap hydrogen – and whether the gas would be better used elsewhere.
The following pages include some of the photos from my collection, including both digital and scanned images.
My photographs have appeared in Popular Science, Sierra, Solar Age, Alternative Sources of Energy, L’Espresso, Air & Space Smithsonian, Windpower Monthly, WindStats, Renewable Energy World, and other magazines, in several engineering and physics textbooks, on brochures and posters published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, by Friends of the Earth (UK), by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Wildlife Fund.
