Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2002
According to beer salesman and baseball great Yogi Berra, making accurate predictions can be a difficult task — especially when it involves the future. That sounds about right, particularly at this time of year when soothsayers — oops, market analysts — are spouting off more than Moby Dick. Let's see, nanotechnology is the next darling of venture capitalists, Linux will benefit from better marketing, hardware platform markets will experience price/margin pressure. Bluetooth will take off, small businesses will buy less, the Dow will go to 10,999, there'll be 440 million mobile phones sold, telecom is in for a banner year, telecom is in for a bummer year, yada, yada, yada. Gee, knowing what's going to happen kind of takes the fun out of getting up every morning.
In truth, there's nothing new about predicting the future of technology. Back in the 1950s, for instance, electrical utilities promising "better living through electricity" predicted a self-serving future of all-electric homes with modern conveniences. To generate excitement, they built model homes sporting the latest technological gizmos. Even Disneyland got into the act, opening its Monsanto House of the Future in 1957, which featured picture telephones, microwave ovens, and electric toothbrushes. Showing again that the future isn't what it used to be, the House of the Future became the House of the Past when Disney tore it down in 1967.
Interestingly, one all-electric home of the future built by Kansas City (Missouri) Power & Light still exists as an exhibit at the Johnson County (Kansas) Museum of History (http://kcsun4.kcstar.com/schools/JohnsonCountyMuseums/aeh.htm). Constructed in 1953 for $42,000 (at a time when homes typically cost $15,000), the house was supposedly built for research purposes. It included innovations such as a heat pump for cooling/heating, an electric garage door opener, a master control panel for controlling any electrical circuit/appliance in the house, a switch panel indicating which appliances were in use, an electric fireplace, an electric clothes iron, a combination heat/tanning/germ-killing ozone lamp, and more. And since women would be wearing high-heel shoes throughout the day because of less housework, electrical outlets were conveniently placed at waist-high level so the lady of the house wouldn't have to bend over while wearing those three-inch spikes. Mood lighting was implemented throughout, and windows were located head-high to prevent Russian spies from easily seeing what went on behind American closed doors.
As you'd expect, we take many of these innovations — garage door openers, garbage disposals, automatic clothes washer/dryers, three-inch spiked heels — for granted. Others, such as heat pumps, are still around, but never made it into the mainstream. Of course, what electrical prognosticators didn't foresee was the digital revolution and its impact half a century later.
Today, much of the interesting news about electricity involves how it's made, rather than what you can do with it. In particular, there's growing interest in wind-generated electricity, thanks in part to more efficient and lower cost wind turbines. Today's windmills, for instance, can generate electricity from winds blowing at 5-10 miles per hour. However, according to the American Wind Energy Association (http://www.awea.org/), less than 0.5 percent of electricity generated in the U.S. comes from windpower. One reason for this is that it costs from 4-6 cents per kilowatt-hour to generate electricity using wind versus 3.5 cents by natural gas (unless you live in California, where you are being gouged at 15-20 cents per kilowatt-hour). Still, the generating capacity of windpower almost doubled in 2001 and wind-powered generation is predicted to grow to 6 percent of the total U.S. capacity by 2020.
Of course, building windfarms requires lots of space and lots of wind — something you find in North Dakota, Texas, Kansas, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, and the like. However, what you don't find in those states are enough people to justify the cost of the electricity. But this is changing, too, thanks to more efficient distribution. Consequently, new windfarms have come online throughout the U.S. in the past year, including the world's largest wind-powered project — the 300-megawatt Stateline Wind Generating Project with 450 wind turbines that produce electricity for 70,000 homes in Portland, Oregon. Each wind turbine is 242 feet tall (including its 77-foot blades) with a rotating diameter of 154 feet. Electronic control systems point turbines into the wind and adjust the blade pitch to make the best use of wind at any speed, allowing the turbines to generate power at wind speeds of 7-56 MPH. The 30-megawatt Montfort Wind Farm in Wisconsin also went online last year, providing power to 10,500 Wisconsin homes, as did the 110-megawatt Gray County Wind Farm in Montezuma, Kansas, which uses 170 wind turbines to provide electricity for 33,000 homes in Missouri and Kansas.
Worldwide, wind turbines generate about 17,000 megawatts of electricity a year, with the U.S. contributing approximately 4500 megawatts. Granted this isn't much when compared to the approximately 3 million megawatts generated worldwide, but it is a start and, assuming we can keep Enron-style crooks at bay (or better yet, in jail), the future indeed looks good for wind-generated electricity.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com