Marcellus Jacobs: Wind-Power Generating Inventor
(Page 11 of 12)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: Do you think those days will ever come back? What future do you see for windplants?
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JACOBS: There'll always be a small, scattered market for individual plants—especially in the more remote areas of the world—but the Rural Electrification Administration has pretty well killed the demand for self-contained DC systems in this country. AC is just too readily available everywhere. Alternating current is all over the place...often at artificially low prices. That's a tough combination to beat and I quit trying to fight it in the 50's. I could see the handwriting on the wall back around '52, '53, '54...and we closed the factory in 1956.
PLOWBOY: But conditions are changing. There is an energy crisis now, you know. That AC is going to get more and more expensive and we're going to have to tap some power sources—such as the wind-that we haven't really thought a lot about in the past.
JACOBS: Yes, but I still feel that the individual DC plant is largely a thing of the past. If I were building windplants today, I'd go AC. And I wouldn't concentrate on the small units...I'd think about larger ones that could feed directly into the distribution grid that's already set up.
As a matter of fact, I proposed just that idea to Congress back in 1952. The power companies, you know, already have a great number of steel towers set up to carry their transmission lines across the country. I added to this the fact that AC generators require almost no maintenance at all...and I came up with an idea: Put windplants right on top of the towers.
Pick a stretch—I took Minneapolis to Great Falls for an example—and install a thousand AC windplants on the towers in between. It doesn't matter what the wind does, at least some of the generators will be producing all the time. Just let 'em feed supplemental power into the grid whenever the wind blows.
The beautiful part of this plan is the fact that the wind blows strongest and most steadily when we need it most...in the winter. I've talked to the men who manage the power grid and they tell me electric heat has become so popular that they're now forced to keep thousands of dollars' worth of standby diesels on hand...just to handle the winter overload.
PLOWBOY: OK. But let's say that someone who reads this doesn't agree with you. Let's say he wants to go into business right now manufacturing essentially the same windplant you produced for 25 years. What happened to your old dies, the old tools? What about your patents?
JACOBS: The equipment is all gone. I stopped in at the factory a while back and it's used for something else now. None of the original setup is there at all. As for the patents...quite a few are public property now.
PLOWBOY: All right. Let's get even more basic. What if an individual wants to go out and build his own windplant the way you put your first ones together...with materials he finds in junkyards and other odds and ends?
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