The Importance of basic Research for Inventions and Innovations in Wind Industry. Some Experiences from Denmark and China 1973 - 2011

Wind generated production of electricity by use of wind turbines began by inventions made at nearly the same time but independently by three natural science academic educated people as the Scotch professor in electrical technology James Blyth in 1887, the American mining engineer Charles F Brush during winter 1887-88 and the Danish physicist and meteorologist Poul la Cour in 1891.

The Blyth and Brush turbines were constructed from existing technologies with the purpose to satisfy the inventors' personal needs of electricity. The la Cour turbine was intended to deliver electricity to rural districts in Denmark. With the traditional Dutch wind mills at that time it was possible to harvest 7 percent of the energy in the wind.

For la Cour it was clear from beginning that this yield percentage should be much higher if wind electricity should be relevant in practice. The solution came with help from two Danish engineers H C Vogt and Johan Irminger who made basic research in aerodynamics a little bit of time before la Cour started up (Guy Larose and Niels Franck: Early wind engineering experiments in Denmark, in Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, 72 (1997), pp. 493-499)