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Tilting
Mon May 24, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, Irish resident and commentator
Chuck Kruger shares a windmill story.
In 1988, Don Quixote would have been at home on Cape Clear, Ireland’s
southernmost island, for two 84 giant windmills suddenly challenged all comers.
Erected on the island’s highest hill, 533 feet above sea level, they breathed in the
Atlantic winds for all they were worth, and immediately established themselves as both
an environmentally harmonious and functioning power and a dramatically visible
symbol of the island.
And they were part of a potentially revolutionary prototype, the first system in the world
to integrate windmills, a computer control system, back-up diesel generators, and
battery storage to help out with the shift from windmills to generators whenever the
wind dropped below Force 3.
German-made, these windmills provided roughly seventy percent of Cape’s electricity.
Quite a change for an island that earlier than 1974 had no electricity whatsoever and
now had become a case study for other countries investigating alternative
energy.
For an outpost into the Atlantic like Cape, I then thought, what a natural way to harness
horsepower, put it between the shafts of such giant beasts. What a way to live properly
in your environment. But within several years, to the island’s dismay, Ireland’s
Electricity Supply Board decided not to take over, as originally planned, this EU- and
German-initiated project.
If only Don Quixote rather than the ESB had been tilting at Cape’s windmills, they’d still
be working rather than standing forlorn, one without a blade, the other still turning but
without a purpose, both symbols of neglect. Fortunately several other islands now
utilize the integrated wind energy system developed on Cape.
Chuck Kruger comes to us from Cape Clear Island, Ireland. The Weather Notebook is
produced with funding from the National Science Foundation and Subaru of America.
We are a program of the Mount Washington Observatory, on the web at
www.mountwashington.org.
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