Wednesday, October 19 —. Throughout the decades since the oil embargo of 1973, increasing research and development has gone into renewable sources of energy. Some of the results are seen atop windswept hills and plains across America — large electricity generating windmills. The first practical wind turbine generator goes back 75 years. It was on this date in 1941 that Palmer Putnam of Vermont demonstrated his device. His wind turbine had blades 66 feet in length, and in over 700 hours of operation, produced almost 300,000-kilowatt hours. In the U.S. today, there are nearly 2,800 electric power-generating establishments producing 4.1 terawatt hours. The 49,000 wind turbines in the U.S. account for 4.7 percent of the country’s electricity production.
Profile America is in its 20th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.
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