Interest article about windmills and waterwheels in Europe

[NickW + 2,714]

At peak 200,000 windmills and 500,000 water wheels in Europe

Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

[markslawson + 1,057]

1 hour ago, NickW said:

At peak 200,000 windmills and 500,000 water wheels in Europe

Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

Nick - quite right. In fact, wind mills of a sort are still in use on Australian farms to pump water. It is simply not worth replacing them with some electric or petrol motor. They can stop pumping for a time and there is still plenty of water in the reservoir-tank.. Windmills in Europe also survived for a long time after steam just depending on what they were expected to do versus the cost of replacing them.. water power was an earlier driver of the industrial revolution but in that case they were mostly (note mostly) replaced by steam as too unreliable for factory machines.. even so the early steam engines were messy, difficult, dangerous, fuel-consuming things... The real advance, however, was when factories switched away from central drive shafts to using electricity to power the machines.. sometime in the 1920s? Someone may have a better idea of the history than me..  

[turbguy + 1,537]

1 hour ago, NickW said:

At peak 200,000 windmills and 500,000 water wheels in Europe

Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

What goes around, comes around?

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

1 hour ago, turbguy said:

What goes around, comes around?

No pun intended?  

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

10 hours ago, NickW said:

At peak 200,000 windmills and 500,000 water wheels in Europe

Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

The basic principles and tech is still sound

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/07/20200703-norsepower.html These are being installed on fully commercial terms without subsidies; the fuel consumption reduction pays for the investment and the green profile looks good to the public... 

I love this sort of thing - effiency gains and cost savings....

it is also proof of demand destruction on the works.. I have seen several threads here saying same is happening for cars... And no, we don't need to go all electric. A 20 - 30 % reduction in fuel consumption driven by cost saving will have a serious impact on the oil industry. 

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

https://quantafuel.com/ 

This is another thing - I think we will see many more of these being built in the West. Partly to reduce depence on imports, partly for job creation. Maybe politicians will use green arguments to sell, but the aforementioned will be the drivers.

@Jan van Eck used to talk about this type of tech

Edited February 26, 2021 by Rasmus Jorgensen

[NickW + 2,714]

18 hours ago, markslawson said:

Nick - quite right. In fact, wind mills of a sort are still in use on Australian farms to pump water. It is simply not worth replacing them with some electric or petrol motor. They can stop pumping for a time and there is still plenty of water in the reservoir-tank.. Windmills in Europe also survived for a long time after steam just depending on what they were expected to do versus the cost of replacing them.. water power was an earlier driver of the industrial revolution but in that case they were mostly (note mostly) replaced by steam as too unreliable for factory machines.. even so the early steam engines were messy, difficult, dangerous, fuel-consuming things... The real advance, however, was when factories switched away from central drive shafts to using electricity to power the machines.. sometime in the 1920s? Someone may have a better idea of the history than me..  

By the time of the industrial revolution places like the UK were running out of waterwheel locations and wind was more limited. Coal didn't replace these technologies. It was more a case of coal providing for the expansion. 

With waterwheels and windmills most of the investment is upfront so once built might as well use to the end of their functional lives 

Similar story with canals and railways. The canals kept functioning long after the arrival of rail. 

Edited February 26, 2021 by NickW

[markslawson + 1,057]

5 hours ago, NickW said:

By the time of the industrial revolution places like the UK were running out of waterwheel locations and wind was more limited. Coal didn't replace these technologies. It was more a case of coal providing for the expansion. 

No, by any reasonable definition steam engines replaced waterwheels for factories, but they took some time to do it .. any new technology takes some time to adopt, often decades - mills could operate quite successfully with waterwheels but the output was too variable - and the use of wind mills in factories was never common, they were simply too unreliable. However, there would certainly have been some overlap in the technologies, and both waterwheels and windmills would have been used for many decades after for grinding grain and the like.. 

You may want to rethink this desperate defense of wind power in any circumstances.. anyway, that's as far as the discussion on this can go. Leave it with you..    

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

12 minutes ago, markslawson said:

You may want to rethink this desperate defense of wind power in any circumstances.. anyway, that's as far as the discussion on this can go. Leave it with you.. 

Correct.  We'll get there.  Proper mix or total transition.  No reason to force it.

[NickW + 2,714]

10 hours ago, markslawson said:

No, by any reasonable definition steam engines replaced waterwheels for factories, but they took some time to do it .. any new technology takes some time to adopt, often decades - mills could operate quite successfully with waterwheels but the output was too variable - and the use of wind mills in factories was never common, they were simply too unreliable. However, there would certainly have been some overlap in the technologies, and both waterwheels and windmills would have been used for many decades after for grinding grain and the like.. 

You may want to rethink this desperate defense of wind power in any circumstances.. anyway, that's as far as the discussion on this can go. Leave it with you..    

If you look at the actual evidence windmills were being built for about 140 years after the roll out of steam engines (early 1800's). While acknowledging the drawbacks of intermittency a particular appeal for energy poor countries like the Netherlands was that this was a freely available and fairly ubiquitous energy resource. Similar arguments can be made today for why many countries see the benefit of wind / solar. 

Far from the arrival of steam meaning everyone dropped wind and water, coal effectively permitted the expansion of industrial activities. The wind and Hydro resources would have been utilised until the end of their functional lives. While I would accept that in coal rich countries at the time (such as the UK) the takeover of coal would have been more rapid the availability of wind and water resources in energy poor countries would have been far more favourable. 

A few extracts to help you below.

The grinding of grain remained the most important use of windmills - as late as 1900, the entire wheat harvest of Northern Europe was ground by windmills in the Netherlands

 The highest tower mill ever constructed was made entirely out of wood. It was standing in the Netherlands and was constructed in 1899 ("De Hoop" or "The Hope" in Prinsenhagen, now the city of Breda). It stood 38 metres (125 ft) tall, with sails around 27 metres (88.5 ft) in diameter. The cap and sails were removed in 1929 but the tower is still there.

The two Dutch windmills with the largest sail diameter are standing in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, built between 1903 and 1905. The largest one, the "Murphy Windmill", stands 29 metres (95 ft) tall with sails 35 metres (114 ft) across. The stocks were cut from one single log - the US had larger trees. But its gearwork is made entirely of cast iron and that shows: the mill pumped up to 150,000 litres (40,000 gallons) of water per day to irrigate the park. 

 

Through the application of aeronautical principles and the use of sheet metal (basically equipping traditional windmills with sails somewhat similar to the blades of modern wind turbines) the maximum power output of a windmill was doubled from 50 to 100 horsepower at the end of the 1920s.

More than 70 windmills were equipped with the new "Dekkerized sails" during the following decade. Moreover, improvements in the gearwork slashed energy losses and allowed for windmills to generate much more power at lower wind speeds.

More improvements during the 1930s by Chris van Bussel, Kurt Bilau, G.J. Ten Have, Van Riet, P.L. Fauël (picture right), Sabinin and Yurieff led to a windmill, installed in 1940 and demolished in 1960, with up to two and a half times the power output of windmills with traditional sails: 125 horsepower.