Wind Energy for the Rest of Us straddles two—or more—worlds. The book is about wind energy. It’s not just about small wind turbines. It’s not just about large wind turbines. It’s about the depth and breadth of wind energy, encompassing more than either type of wind turbine. It includes water-pumping windmills and sailing ships. It’s a sprawling book, one minute discussing how to install small wind turbines safely, the next explaining how farmers in Indiana can earn millions of dollars in revenue by installing their own multimegawatt wind turbines. It’s a book hard to categorize. That suits Gipe. He likes to think he’s hard to categorize after four decades in renewable energy. His book tells the story of modern wind energy in all its complexity and introduces electricity rebels to a North American audience for the first time--the trailblazers who have launched a renewable energy revolution in Europe.
The book debunks novel wind turbines their promoters claim will generate electricity “too cheap to meter,” and rebukes revisionist historians who falsely argue that it was the aerospace industry that delivered today’s modern wind turbines.
Gipe explains why new wind turbines are part of a silent revolution that is changing the way we use wind energy. This revolution doesn’t garner headlines, but is making wind turbines more cost-effective in more places than ever before, lessening the need for new transmission lines, obviating the need for storage, and fueling rapid growth.
Gipe refutes many common myths surrounding wind energy and argues persuasively that wind turbines are productive, effective, and environmentally sound. He argues that wind energy is too important to be left to electric utilities and their subsidiaries alone. Wind energy is also for the rest of us, he says. It is our resource. We can develop it and we can own it--ourselves.
Paul Gipe has been named to the Energy Watch Group, one of only two North Americans on the prestigious panel. He joins Stanford academic Mark Jacobson, internationally known for his work on moving to 100% renewable energy.
The Energy Watch Group’s network contains many current and former parliamentarians among its 28 members, including Hans-Josef Fell, Christine Milne, and Rudolf Rechsteiner. Fell, along with the late Hermann Scheer, was the author of Germany’s famed Renewable Energy Sources Act, which led to a renewable energy revolution in Germany. Milne is a former Australian senator who also actively campaigned for renewable energy policy. As a member of the Swiss parliament, Rechsteiner was responsible for introducing Switzerland’s version of the Renewable Energy Sources Act.
The Group also includes other well known scientists working with renewable energy, including Eicke Weber, formerly a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and now head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany.
The Energy Watch Group (EWG) is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan global network of scientists and parliamentarians. EWG was established in 2006 by an international group of parliamentarians under the direction of then-member of the German Parliament Hans-Josef Fell.
Gipe has worked with renewable energy for the past four decades and was instrumental in adapting the German renewable energy policy to the North American market. He is the author of the recently released Wind Energy for the Rest of Us, a book that explains how electricity rebels are driving a renewable energy revolution.
Gipe said he was “humbled to be inducted into such an august group.”
Ok, we did have a previous ship date. Printed copies of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us were to arrive in the warehouse at the end of October. Obviously, that didn’t happen--and for good reason. I called a halt.
The Blues
Quad/Graphics delivered “blues” to me nearly a month ago. Why they are called blues was never explained. As the publisher of this book it’s assumed I know all these terms. . .
The blues are copies of each signature of 16 sheets with pages two up. They also ship some laser prints, effectively photographic prints, of selected pages to gage reproduction quality.
As the author, photographer, and now publisher of this book it was heartbreaking to see many of the images—and there are more than 400 illustrations of one kind or another—were too dark.
After consultation with the designer, I shipped the blues to him and they had to do new color separations of all the problematic images. This delayed printing by about three weeks.
A second set of blues were delivered here Friday morning. By noon I’d looked through all the signatures, signed them, and had them at FedEx.
Quad/Graphics tells me the new ship date is 8 November, the same date as the US election. I am not sure if I should read any meaning into the alignment of those two events. Time will tell. . .
Once the books arrive in the warehouse, we can begin shipping complimentary copies.
More correctly, the Chelsea Green warehouse has books. They arrived 9 November all 2,150 copies.
The books arrived just in time for the gift-giving season. That wasn’t my intent. That’s just the way it happened. It takes a very long time to publish a big book and this is a very big book. The 560-page tome weighs in at 2.9 pounds (1.3 kilograms) and contains nearly 550 illustrations.
Amazon and Barnes & Noble also have books inventory. Amazon shows it has a whopping 14 copies on hand. They must have sold at least one. The giant online retailer had claimed that Wind Energy for the Rest of Us was #1 in new releases a few days ago. It’s now #9 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Energy Production & Extraction > Alternative & Renewable > Wind. That’s narrowing the field down just a wee bit. Of course, its sales rank of #238,650 of all books on Amazon is more humbling.
Both Barnes & Noble and Amazon are discounting the book 32% to $44 USD and offering free shipping. If you live in Manhattan and you order from Barnes & Noble, you can get same day delivery. Now, if there was only someone in Manhattan who wanted a big, thick, windmill book. . .
The book is also available from Indigo/Chapters and McNally Robinson in Canada.
It’s a great relief that the book has been officially launched and the distributor’s metadata has filtered out to all the appropriate retail channels.
More about the book and the four-year effort to bring it to fruition can be found on my web site at Wind Energy (2016). There you can also find a detailed table of contents, a list of tables found in the book, sample pages, a detailed description of the book and how it differs from my past work, and early reviews.
