While the Netherlands is the country most known for its windmills, they were originally invented by the Persians. More surprisingly, some of them are still turning after 1,000 years.
The ancient world holds many wonders of technology, and some are only now coming back to the surface like the Antikythera Mechanism. Milling grain with wind power probably started around the 8th Century in Persia, but in Nashtifan, Iran they’ve been keeping the mills running generation-to-generation for over 1000 years. [Mohammed Etebari], the last windmill keeper is in need of an apprentice to keep them running though.
In a world where vertical axis wind turbines seem like a new-fangled fad, it’s interesting to see these panemone windmills are actually the original recipe. The high winds of the region mean that the timber and clay structure of the asbad structure housing the turbine is sufficient for their task without all the fabric or man-made composites of more modern designs. While drag-type turbines aren’t particularly efficient, we do wonder how some of the lessons of repairability might be used to enhance the longevity of modern wind turbines. Getting even 100 years out of a turbine would be some wicked ROI.
Wooden towers aren’t just a thing of the past either, with new wooden wind turbines soaring 100 m into the sky. Since you’ll probably be wanting to generate electricity and not mill grain if you made your own, how does that work anyway?
But a thousand year functional product is bad for the bottom line!! Planned obsolecense?!
Bte what date is DATE? Placeholder left behind?
Don’t worry, it’s more than likely that over those 1000 years some major repair have taken place. Perhaps it could be very profitable to have a 1000 year service contract. You know, build a cheap but crappy device people can’t afford to loose and than cash in on the repairs costs. A bit like printers or razor blades.
You might even wonder if it’s the same thing that was put up 1000 years ago. Think of “The Ship of Theseus Paradox”, anyway, that’s not important. What’s cool is to see that the method of harvesting wind was used this way long long ago.
I wonder though, hackaday is about hacks isn’t it? From a technical perspective the video isn’t interesting at all. It more feels like I’m watching the history channel?!? I wonder when we see a video about the wheel. I’m sure it won’t take long before someone discovers that it was also discovered long long ago too… where does it end?
society has alzheimer. so it ends in the heath death of the universe. people have been reinventing things for as long as the roamed the earth.
and about not interesting at all: n=1. Nobody forced you to read the article. get over it.
speaking of … how do you make boards without a gang saw (or put differently, how do you bootstrap a saw mill when you only have a forest)? The picture on top here looks like there were planks 1000 years ago, how were they made?
Have you never split a log?
Have you? It works for short logs under a foot or two, but not really well for longer timbers. They tend to twist a lot, and it takes an incredible amount of force to pull it apart even if you get it to split.
For the longer pieces, if you want a straight board, you have to hew it out of a full beam, which wastes a lot of material. The alternative is to saw it, but then you need that sawmill.
With a saw and manual labor, or after the 11th century using a water powered sawmill. 1000 years ago isn’t the stone age.
d’oh, sure (I researched too shallow, the english wikipedia article about the history of saws reads much different than the german one, which mentions first steel saws in 15. century next to a picture of roman blades much too short for making boards, while the english article mentions copper and bronze blades, and a first saw mill much much earlier, which means my question doesn’t make any sense)
Too bad we couldn’t just skip all of overly tight T-shirt view time and have a bit of information about that sort of thing instead. sigh, but this gets the clicks ..
For flips sake there’s plenty of other channels/web sites for the titillation stuff, if that’s what I’m in the mood for.
Yep, I played the video for 10 seconds and can confirm it’s rubbish. Hackaday should send someone to the windmill to do a proper techie video. I’m available later next year BTW.
That’s a great idea, I wonder if I could manage to go. Maybe running a hacker’s meetup in places like this could be an interesting plan. Going to have to get that LoRA network up.
Hackaday obviously isn’t only about hacking (and for me it would be pretty boring if it were, because it would limit itself to computer-related subjects). Amazon.com is not in Brasil, either.
Yeah, wanted to fact check myself and somehow glossed right over it during my editing passes. Thanks!
Annual maintenance costs tend to increase over the age of the device, which is why traditional turbines have a technical life of 20-25 years.
Politically, they have a lifespan of 10-15 years since that’s the common length of the subsidy period in most regions, after which the turbine would have to sell at plain market rate without price guarantees or tax breaks. When it’s windy, the spot prices drop towards zero or below and you don’t make any profit. These turbines are then left without maintenance and let to rot until they break and get replaced with new turbines with new subsidy contracts, or even abandoned entirely by some owners who don’t want to pay to dismantle them.
Much depends on where the turbine is located. If it’s in a good spot with steady winds, it can still turn profit, but if it’s in a location with unsteady winds and built simply to harvest the subsidies, it will get abandoned.
To understand the issue: the probability distribution of wind speeds in a typical location is such that 15% of the running hours produce 50% of the kilowatt-hours, but those few hours are also when all the other turbines around are turning because it’s usually associated with large weather fronts up to 1000 km in size. When everyone is producing at the same time, you get oversupply and the prices fall.
That’s why the rate subsidies were originally installed: to insulate the investment into wind turbines from the market disturbances that wind power causes. To force profitability despite not meeting market demand.
E.g. if your limit for profitability is 5 cents/kWh but you are forced to sell half of your power at 2 cents because of insufficient demand, then the other half must be priced above 8 cents to keep the average selling price at 5 cents.
For the typical wind turbine, that 8 cents per kWh or $80/MWh would apply for 85% of the time. Meanwhile, the rest of the market averages well below $80/MWh, which is why the subsidies are needed to pay the difference. Without them, or without some sort of bulk purchase deal with a large utility corporation, you just can’t turn profit out of wind.
(This is producer prices before transmission, retail and tax – not what you end up paying as a consumer.)
Sounds like a skill issue. Wind turbines in Europe have been profitable for decades now. Subsidies were initially necessary to level the playing field (since fossil fuels are heavily subsidized) and to develop the technology. Nowadays, wind is typically the cheapest form of energy (even with the subsidies for gas and coal) and produces up to a third of all electricity is some countries. You do need good interconnections and to be smart about how much you build, what, and where. Over the course of a year, wind varies as pretty much the inverse of solar (more in winter, less in summer) so it’s a good idea to balance those. That becomes more important (as does storage) as the share of intermittents increases.
Yes – on subsidies. Practically all of the projects that have been running “for decades” were subsidized when they started and are still reaping the benefits until the terms run out.
Most countries in the EU have only started scaling back or removing the investment/rate/tax subsidies in the last four or five years, many still continue granting them, and only a handful of projects exist that don’t receive any subsidies at all – mostly off-shore wind farms in special locations.
Mind the point: your LCOE for wind power may be competitive and profitable, but you cannot sell it at that price on the real market, because of the mismatch between supply and demand.
Someone also has to pay for those interconnects and transmission losses, which is an indirect subsidy for wind power as well.
That may be true for electricity, but not for energy . 80% of the market for energy skips the conversion to electricity and uses gas or coal directly as heat, and there wind power is 3-5 times more expensive. Especially with industrial processes that require high temperatures, gas has not been beaten for price and practical utility.
Germany has one of the longest subsidy terms at 20 years with guaranteed prices and profits, and you can still apply. They haven’t gotten rid of it quite yet.
Trigger’s broom… Same windmill, it’s had 19 new shafts, 138 new blades and 47 new milling stones. Same windmill mind you…. 😁
I cannot say much about the persian windmills, but the dutch ones often still contain a lot of original 1600s era wooden parts. Occasionally, a windmill built in let’s say 1700, will still contain parts from the 1600s because of reuse of older materials that were still good. Windmills were also sometimes disassembled completely and moved to a different location. Some of those windmills on the Zaanse Schans were originally standing all throughout the city. It wasn’t untill the 1960s that they were disassembled and moved to their current location. Same goes for all those 1600s and 1700s houses and workshops. The 1960s philosophy of preserving history was markedly different of the one of today – but back in the 60s, they thought it was better to concentrate everything in one spot, than to have the occasional windmill in a random place in a newly built residential area. There are pros and cons to everything.
Obviously if you see a windmill here, not everything inside of it will be from the year that the mill was built, but it’s easy to distinguish between old and new wood when you’re inside of one.
Of course, when one burns down and gets rebuilt (sadly not too uncommon, every couple decades one goes up in smoke – thatched roof and wooden construction makes for a highly flamable object), it’s a completely new windmill – just in the location, with the function of, and designed after the one that just burnt down. Although not original, it still has some historical value as being ‘The place where for multiple centuries villagers brought their grain to mill’ and ‘being a showcase of 1600s industry’.
When rebuilding a centuries old windmill after it burns down or breaks or is moved to a new location putting new parts, ie bearings and ‘sails’ can mean the ‘new’ windmill is putting out more energy with less friction and therefore contributing more to the circuit than the prior one was.
Hah, I almost went to Wikipedia to look it up :). Briliant, immortal series! Surprisingly enough, Trigger’s Broom does actually appear in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Alternative_forms
Grandfather’s axe 🪓
(Head replaced once and the handle replaced twice!)
Glad someone got the joke :-)
Whether it is windmills or electronics, repairability is a great way to pass on technical information. I bet many people here have learned a lot by repairing stuff even when it wouldn’t make sense from purely economical point of view.
Other old windmills can be found on the Greek island Crete, on the Lasithi plain.
Can confirm it’s really windy up there.
https://thegenxtravels.com/2019/10/21/windmills-of-lasithi-crete-greece/
what a shame that the attached video doesn’t show even 1 second of the windmill actually working. I found a video that does though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qqifEdqf5g
I did exactly like you: quickly clicked through the video ,couldn’t find any footage of the actual windmill (only a lot of footage of toots), so gave up, Googled it and found the exact same Nat Geo video as you.
At least the 3rd YT video Ive seen on these and there was a PBS show with them as well. If just a percentage of the income from these shows were to pay a salary for that apprenticeship they could likely solve this whole thing. I say this as a livestreamer with income from online video, so i know that its the case. Creators can positively effect our subject matter. But it takes acknowleging that we have a responsibility that comes from mining content from places like this.
They remind me of something out of Myst or Riven
Agree!
It’s interesting that spaces are left between the blades. I wonder if they’ve found that those spaces negligibly affect performance?
My third cousin is a miller at our relative’s mill in West Flanders (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couchezmolen). It was built in 1870. She reports that the cast hub which held the blades was cracked when somebody threw the cog brake on and the blades stopped dead suddenly. It’s since been repaired, but mills in Europe have usually transitioned to restaurants or tourist attractions.