HISTORY OF WIND POWER

Wind power is both old and new. From the sailing ships of the ancient Greeks, to the grain mills of pre-industrial Holland, to the latest high-tech wind turbines rising over the Minnesota prairie, humans have used the power of the wind for millennia.In the United States, the original heyday of wind was between 1870 and 1930, when thousands of farmers across the country used wind to pump water. Small electric wind turbines were used in rural areas as far back as the 1920s, and prototypes of larger machines were built in the 1940s. When the New Deal brought grid-connected electricity to the countryside, however, windmills lost out.
Interest in wind power was reborn during the energy crises of the 1970s. Research by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the 1970s focused on large turbine designs, with funding going to major aerospace manufacturers. While these 2- and 3-MW machines proved mostly unsuccessful at the time, they did provide basic research on blade design and engineering principles.
In other parts of the world, particularly in Europe, wind has had more consistent, long-term support. As a result, European countries are currently capable of meeting more of their electricity demands through wind power with much less land area and resource potential compared with the United States. Denmark, for example, already meets about 20 percent of its electricity demand from wind power. Wind generation also accounts for about six percent of the national power needs in Spain, and five percent in Germany. Serious commitments to reducing global warming emissions, local development, and the determination to avoid fuel imports have been the primary drivers of wind power development .