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
Growian I and II: Germany’s Giant Failure
During the late 1970s Germany’s ministry for technological development BMFT (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) called Ulrich Hütter out of retirement to design a new wind program. He concluded that his 1960s approach still represented the state-of-the-art, and that with the technology gained since his StGW-34 turbine had been dismantled …
Today I publicly urged Bakersfield area congressmen Vince Fong and David Valadao to invoke Article 25 of the US Constitution and immediately remove President Donald Trump from office as unfit to serve. Article 25 differs from impeachment, which requires the House of Representatives to indict a president, and the Senate …
I’ve extracted rare footage of Growian I and II wind turbines from a promotional video by Nordex. The footage from the early 1980s to the early 1990s was taken by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. It is the only video I’ve ever seen of the two German turbines operating. Both turbines had a …
The Sierra Club’s Uriel Payan & Paul Gipe will lead a hike among the wind turbines on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) at 9:00 am on Saturday 16 May 2026 near Tehachapi, California. The Sierra Club leads the hike to spotlight a section of the PCT as well as the …
I’ve uploaded a series of films on historic wind turbines in operation to the Internet Archive. To help me keep track of them, I’ve posted the links and a short summary here. I’ve included some films in this list that are on YouTube.com as the provenance isn’t clear. Of course videos of operating wind turbines are quite common now, so I am limiting this list to those of historic interest.
Despite the doom & gloom here in the states where renewable energy is under a sustained assault by the Trump administration, Germany once again showed the Western world how a modern industrial nation can make the energy transition. In 2025 Wind turbines alone in Germany generated more electricity than coal, …
Wind Energy for Kids (Wind Energie Kinderleicht) is a little book for little people by Thomas Simons. The 27-page booklet is 6 inches by 6 inches, but richly illustrated with simple themes about wind energy. The themes and their illustrations are ideal for parents to read to their children. I …
Other Articles
The current nuclear rate filing is not only about paying for reactors. It is a signal about system design and risk allocation. Ontario can continue to benefit from its nuclear fleet while recognizing that too much nuclear raises costs and reduces flexibility. Keeping nuclear around it’s current capacity and accelerating renewables and electrification offers a clearer path to lower household energy costs and a more stable energy system over time.
The Albany County Conservancy is accusing U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of concealing eagle deaths in Carbon County. A biologist on the ground says golden eagle deaths are soaring due to wind farms. . . The Albany County Conservancy has filed a lawsuit in the District of Columbia to force the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to release all 1,166 pages of the incident reports about bald and golden eagle deaths and injuries related to the Seven Mile Hill, Ekola Flats, and Dunlap wind farms.
Here we go again — the United States of America beating up on weaker nations in order to capture their oil for itself. The overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 (conducted with the enthusiastic support of the UK) was about kneecapping an alleged socialist, Mohammad Mosaddegh, but one of the reasons he was considered so dangerous was because he posed a threat to US access to Iranian oil. Fast forward a few decades and we have Poppy Bush coming to the aid of the aggressively undemocratic rulers of Kuwait in order, once again, to promote free access to that country’s abundant oil reserves. Then came President BushLeague, who puffed out his chest and hollered about “yellow cake” and “weapons of mass destruction,” but his real interest was in preserving American access to Iraqi oil reserves.
With the news of the US’ actions in Venezuela this morning, we are reminded again of how reducing oil demand can lead to less conflict – and electric vehicles are our best bet for doing so. . . Mr. Trump stated outright this morning that the reason for the invasion was to steal Venezuela’s oil. Although, this will likely be a difficult process due to decaying infrastructure and long-term destabilization in the country, partially caused by US sanctions to begin with.
Like California, Australia has an enormous amount of solar. The country’s climate-change-and-energy minister just announced that, starting in July, electricity suppliers will be required to offer at least three free hours of midday power in some regions. This will give people a reason to charge their electric vehicles, use heat pumps to precool or preheat their homes and water, and store more clean electricity in batteries when cheap energy is abundant.
A modern windmill — or wind turbine, to be exact — is not so much a constructionthat invites affection or radiates pastoral comfort. Rather, it is something built out ofan urgent necessity — a need for a better means of generating electricity, an inventionmade to wean society away from polluting ourselves into oblivion.
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.
