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
2027 Chevy Bolt Odd Noise at Low Power Levels
Since receiving our 2027 Chevy Bolt 20 February, I’ve noticed an odd noise at low power levels, upon deceleration, or at neutral or zero power levels. I’ve been driving EVs for 12 years now and the noise is not a normal EV sound. It’s not the whine of the motor/generator, …
Dean Thomas, son of Robert Thomas, the designer of the Wind Harvest Vertical Axis Wind Turbine is still plugging away on the design. He’s built a 1/40-scale model of a guyed giromill. Based on published information, the optimum solidity for maximum efficiency is 16% so he’s using four blades, two …
I’ve previously written about the history of Wind Harvest’s Vertical Axis Wind Turbine from the mid 1970s. (See Wind Harvest VAWT—a Jungian Vision (the Backstory). Recently, Dean Thomas, the son of Wind Harvest’s founder Robert Thomas, contacted me with more on the history of the turbine’s development from someone who …
We drove to Los Angeles from Bakersfield to meet a friend for lunch Sunday. That may not sound like much to those driving a gasser or a long-range, big battery EV, but it’s significant to us. We drive a 2027 Chevy Bolt, the least expensive EV in the US. We …
It’s been one month since our 2027 Bolt was hand delivered. I am still working through the new driver’s interface and changes to the controls, but we’re using it. I’ve now driven more than 1,000 miles so I can report on actual and reported range, and the traction battery’s capacity. …
Nobel winning American economist Paul Krugman asked today on his podcast if it was time again to call for a 55 mph speed limit to conserve gasoline. As an economist, he said, it made sense to call for conservation to reduce demand for oil. A national conservation program would also …
The information displays on the 2027 Bolt EV are quite different from that on the first generation Bolt. In some ways, it’s much improved, in other ways, not so much. The new Bolt finally displays state-of-charge (SOC), a parameter that drivers have been demanding since the first Bolt was launched …
Other Articles
Ontario’s return to renewable procurement is the clearest sign that one of Canada’s largest electricity markets has accepted a reality it spent years resisting. The timing is propitious as I prepare to provide an update to a global audience on North American wind energy through the World Wind Energy Association. Electricity demand is rising as transport, buildings, and industry electrify. Refusing wind and solar in that environment was never a long-term strategy. It was a pause wrapped in politics.
Most of us have forgotten how the Big Three snookered the Obama administration into creating two classes of fuel economy standards — one for passenger cars and another for light trucks. In theory, the light truck provision was to benefit farmers who needed them to get their goods to market, but the automakers used that exception to create a whole new class of vehicles that were never intended to work for a living, The SUV originally was little more than a pickup truck with a passenger car body on top. The companies promised the Obamans they would use the bailouts offered them to build new fuel efficient small cars, but as soon as the ink was dry, they forgot all about those promises and went full tilt boogie into cranking out high end pickups and SUVs.
Coal was not the global winner of the Hormuz shock. It was a regional emergency beneficiary in a few LNG-exposed markets. Renewables alone did not replace LNG everywhere either. But renewables plus batteries, backed by hydro, nuclear, interconnection, and demand flexibility where available, already replaced enough of LNG’s daily balancing role in several major markets to overturn the old assumption that a gas shock naturally belongs to coal. The real strategic winner was not a single fuel. It was the clean flexibility stack, and the countries building it fastest are the ones rewriting what energy security means.
Transitioning to clean energy isn’t just about cutting carbon emissions or saving the environment. It’s about starving a deeply unethical system that rewards the absolute worst human impulses. We can talk about numbers all day. There’s a possible 33.7 kWh per gallon of gasoline, but how many Iranian schoolchildren is a barrel of oil worth? How much is global security worth? If the worst case scenario happens and this thing goes nuclear, will we feel like it was a good price to pay for some oil companies to have a record quarter? There are some things in life that you really can’t put a number on.
Let’s not make a secret of this. The world is hurtling at breakneck speed towards the worst-ever energy crisis. This will be worse than the oil crises of the 1970s. It could be worse even than the oil crisis of 2007-2012, the latter which triggered the global financial meltdown of 2008. Maybe it is small comfort to those billions of people around the world facing hardship in this developing crisis. However, out of the ruins we shall see a market and state-driven renewed drive towards installation of wind, solar, batteries and Electric Vehicles.
Krugman notes that while the price of oil has increased, the price of gasoline has gone up much more quickly. Are oil companies taking advantage of the situation to extract additional profits? What do you think? The so-called US president — in his lucid moments — rails against renewable energy, probably because the fossil fuel industry has so generously supported his lunacy for their own private benefit. But Krugman suggested the UK and other European nations must be wishing they were getting an even larger share of their energy from renewables rather than natural gas, which would free them both from the idiocy of Trump’s delusions and the Middle East war.
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.
