Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Some people went home to show how it could be done in a
technically and aesthetically professional manner. “It would really
be impossible to make people support renewable energy with the
low level of technology demonstrated on the camp,” blade pioneer
Erik Grove-Nielsen remarked much later to me. We had both been
at the camp.
7.7
The Swedish Connection
When it comes to design, manufacturing or purchasing wind
turbines, people often did not really know what to believe. In
1975, there was only one topic specifically about windmills,
and it was in Swedish. Its title was
Vindkraftboken
(
The Wind
Power Topic
), written by Bengt Södergaard, who sadly enticed
many do-it-yourself people, amongst others myself, into building
windmills. None of them
ever came to work properly despite the
many elaborate instructions and calculations. The author fatally
lacked the basic experience. He sold dreams, and it is, of course,
possible to learn from the mistakes one makes. Many of the
later Danish windmill designers learned from Södergaard how not
to do it.
By a funny coincidence, another Swedish dream was onstage
at the same time. At Kolding Folk High School, architect Carl
Herforth was engaged in building a zero-energy house, which was
to get its power from a windmill. He had found a Swedish windmill,
which, regarding price and efficiency, beat everything else. It
was a sensation that made its way into the newspaper columns.
Permission had been obtained from the town council to erect it, and
from the power utility of Kolding to connect it to the grid, in order
to make the electricity meter run backwards, when the windmill
produced more power than the house consumed.
2
reported
that this was the first time such a permission had been given in
Denmark, thus missing the fact that already in the 1950s, J. Juul had
erected three grid-connected windmills on the islands of Zealand,
Møn and Falster, with rated power from 11 kW to 200 kW, using
the principle of the asynchronous generator. This illustrates clearly
that, when not kept up, fundamental knowledge and experience
An independent Danish daily newspaper
Information
2
By 2012, it is called net metering.
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