UK Wind energy success - at look back at the start

 ‘Wind generated more than 85TWh - nearly 30% - of Great Britain's electricity last year,’ so said the BBC recently. It certainly does seem to be a big success.  So to welcome in the new year, we take a look back at the early days of UK wind, to see how we got here, with coverage of a new report by alternative energy pioneer and eco-architect Dr Derek Taylor, who is now a Visiting Fellow at the Open University. He has had over 50 years of involvement with wind energy, including having developed some novel wind turbine designs at the OU. 

Back in 1975 he organised the UK’s First Workshop conference series on wind power held at the Architectural Association in London. It was evidently a seminal event.  In his new report he looks in detail at the contributions he and others made to it. He focusses in particular at two large pioneering projects, part of the of the impressive 1950’s British wind power programme managed by the Electrical Research Association (ERA) Wind Power Committee and led by Edward Golding and later by Arthur Stodhart. 

The ERA planned to design and commission three 100 kW wind generators and chose Costa Hill on Orkney as the site for its first prototype. Taylor reports on the contribution to the workshop by Roger Tagg who had been involved with ERA’s extensive national wind power measurement programme. It  had generated contour maps to help choose the location for the 1st wind generator. The maps proved very useful later, even after, sadly, the ERA programme ended. 

Taylor notes that the ‘100kW 15.2m diameter horizontal axis downwind wind generator with variable pitch and coning blades was developed by John Brown Engineering who utilised their subsidiary ‘Westland Helicopters’ in the design of the rotor. Each blade had a laminated wood spar, wood ribs, clad in a plywood skin coated in plastic. It was installed in 1955 on Costa Hill, Orkney and operated for two years until it was wrecked by storms.’  There’s a fascinating (if wobbly) documentary film showing its construction, installation, and operation from the Scottish Screen Archive and uploaded by Orkney Sustainable Energy.

The second project Taylor looks is the 100kW machine built in 1959 by Prof. Doug Elliott (no relation to me!) from the Dept of Mech. Engineering, University of Aston for the Ministry of Fuel & Power on the Isle of Man. As Elliott noted at the AA workshop, it was designed by Irwin & Partners in London and manufactured by R. Smith of Crawley. It used a braced 3-blade upwind rotor in a design that echoed that of Juul’s Gedser pioneering wind turbine in Denmark. 

Taylor notes that ‘like the Gedser rotor it used untapered blades, though unlike the Gedser blades they were not twisted and also were made from extruded aluminium. Interestingly profile used was a 25% thick symmetrical aerofoil and the blades were set a zero pitch. This was a much more rugged design and yawed (oriented) with a fantail mechanism. It was also designed to be stall-controlled as well as employing tip brakes for over-speed control. By opting for this type of blade design and manufacturing method and by avoiding the complex variable pitch controls of the ERA Orkney design this led to a much less expensive approach though forgoing optimal performance.’ 

He adds ‘In many ways this rugged stall-controlled wind turbine powering an induction generator with its rotor directly mounted on an integrated gearbox, could also claim to be the predecessor to the very successful fixed pitch wind turbines that began to be manufactured in the later part of the 1970s - soon after the 1975 AA Wind Power Workshop Conference in fact’.  

He concludes ‘the IoM wind generator was the most successful of the British 100 kW designs of the 1950s and is said to have generated 230,000 to 240,000 kWh per year which was quite an achievement, achieving a peak output of 120 kW at 22.5 m/s wind speed. The average output was 25% of the rated capacity performing better than the wind tunnel tests had indicated. It also survived longer than the ERA Orkney wind generator. Some five years until 1964’.  

Taylor also reports on a series of smaller projects, including an iconic wooden bladed mill built by Dave Andrews, which graced the Comtek ‘community technology’ festival site in Bath, and a fibre-glass one made by Dr Kit Pedler, an early Dr Who science advisor and creator of the ‘Doomwatch’ TV series. Those were the days! Lots of enthusiasts and lots of enthusiasm.

Prof. Elliott had commented at the AA gathering that ‘the concept of a constant speed, self-regulating, fixed blade windmill appears to be a practical way of achieving a low cost windmill.’ But it took some time for wind turbines to be taken seriously in the UK. As Taylor notes, there were some one-offs like Sir Henry Lawson Tancred’s 3-bladed upwind 17 m diameter 30-50 kW Elteeco Aerogenerators, with braced rotors, similar to the IoM and Gedser wind turbines. He built three turbines at Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire, the first being in 1976 and the last in the 1980s. They were monitored by the CEGB, the UK public electricity generation company. 

However, when the CEGB finally got round to backing wind power seriously, from the mid 1980s, it moved on to very large machines, the Wind Energy Group consortium ramping up via a 250kW prototype to a huge 3MW machine on the Orkneys. That was something of a failure- too large, too fast, but that’s another story. Wind farms spread, initially in Denmark, using smaller Danish wind turbines, and then elsewhere, across Europe and the USA. The first UK wind farm, with Danish turbines, was built in 1991 at Delabole in Cornwall by local farmer and entrepreneur, Peter Edwards, sadly recently deceased. Subsequently, wind technology moved upscale and won out big time almost everywhere, including in the UK, with large numbers being installed on shore and increasingly offshore. The pioneers in the UK and elsewhere really did start something….