When I joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 1994, wind power appeared to have reached its nadir. The California Wind Rush of the 1980s had crashed, global energy prices had fallen from their peaks, and wind turbine manufacturers and developers were struggling to stay afloat. Wind power technology itself appeared unrefined and sometimes unreliable. This was before policy makers in the United States and Europe began enacting support programs that would ultimately jumpstart the rise of wind power in the twenty‐first century. When US manufacturer Kenetech filed for bankruptcy in the spring of 1996, it seemed to confirm our worst fears about the future of wind energy.

Yet—to those who studied the technology—it was abundantly clear that wind power still had enormous potential to transform the global energy landscape. Both public and private research efforts had advanced the technology to the point where it had become evident that wind power could successfully integrate into power networks across the globe and—with continued effort—we believed that wind power would eventually achieve the cost and reliability targets needed to compete head‐to‐head with conventional generation options in a commercial environment. The technology just needed more time and additional policy support in order to get the ball rolling again.

Today, as we look back from 2019, what's happened since has exceeded the expectations of even the most optimistic wind power believers. From a global installed base of 3.5 gigawatts (GW) in 1994, wind power grew to nearly 600 GW by the end of 2018. In other words, the installed base of wind power increased over one hundred and fifty times. Wind power is now being added to power networks around the world at a rate of over fifty gigawatts per year. Here in the United States, there's more wind and solar being added to the grid than all other sources combined. The rise of wind power has been breathtaking.

Wind power's rise occurred just in time. The growing threat of climate change is the greatest challenge facing humankind today, and zero‐greenhouse gas emitting wind power technologies represent one of the great technological solutions at our disposal. Wind power is now playing a critical role in ushering much‐needed transformation into the global energy system. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, it is more important than ever to hasten the adoption of wind power and all other low carbon technologies. Given the success to date, it's now time to hit the accelerator, not the brake. Our future depends upon it.

Because of the important role that wind power is playing on the global stage, I believe it is important to convey the full story of wind power's arrival on the global energy scene. As I dug deeper into the history of wind power, it became clear to me that the nadir that I witnessed in 1994 was just another cycle in wind power's long history. Most modern observers believe that the development of wind power started in earnest in Denmark or California in 1980s. More astute observers trace the beginning of wind power back to the global energy crisis in 1973 and the national research programs that were initiated in the wake of that crisis.

However—as it turns out—wind power's origins trace back to the late nineteenth century. In fact, to truly appreciate the wind power story, we need to go all the way back to Scotland in the winter of 1887. This is when university professor James Blyth affixed an electric generator to a windmill in order to produce electricity for his cottage. That was the birth of the wind turbine—a combination of the centuries‐old windmill and the nineteenth century electric generator.

Wind power's journey across the twentieth century is a colorful tale. The journey was filled with starry‐eyed dreamers such as Germany's Herman Honnef who envisioned massive direct drive wind turbines in the 1930s that were sixty years ahead of his time, and pragmatists—such as Americans Joe and Marcellus Jacobs—who built their first small wind turbines in the 1920s using spare car parts. The story is also full of interesting illuminations and novel innovations, like Ulrich Hütter's use of fiberglass composite wind turbine blades for the first time in the 1950s, and Johannes Juul's invisible solution to taming Mother Nature using a passive stall wind turbine design for the first time. Let us not forget about the craftsmen in Denmark who reinvented wind power in the 1970s, and the cowboys in California who presided over the California Wind Rush in the 1980s. My goal in writing this book is to capture all of these stories in one place, while providing the broader context of the surrounding energy technology, policy, and market landscape. Along the way, I trace the evolution of wind power technology innovations and highlight the people that made them possible.

My hope is that with this material in one place, we can reflect upon wind power's long struggle and recent emergence, and use the insights gained to help guide our collective energy future. There will be new energy breakthroughs on the horizon and we need to learn to better cultivate those opportunities, lest we allow one of our most promising technologies to languish at the doorstep of tomorrow. In lieu of this broader aspiration, my hope is that readers will simply find the wind power story educational and interesting. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it.