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Marianna Dudley, "Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain by Marianna Dudley" (Manchester UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. My name is Filippo de Chirico and I am your host. Today's guest is Mariana Dudley from the University of Bristol. She's an environmental historian and we're going to talk about her new book, Electric, Wind and Energy History of Modern Britain, out with Manchester University Press just now. Marina, thank you so much for joining me today.
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B
Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
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A
I'll start by saying that I really like this book. Wind power is a crucial technology for decarbonization, and there's a lot of debate around it about its financial viability itself, environmental impact. But not a lot of history has been written about it. So I think this book fills a gap by covering 100 years, perhaps a little more, of the history of this sector in Britain. And besides talking about technology and the business side of it, I really appreciated your attention to the cultural relevance of this sector. You offer an almost anthropological outlook on the relationship between the communities in the areas where wind turbines are situated and the environment they live in. Before we delve into the chapters of the book, could you tell us something about yourself, your training, and how you came to write this book?
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B
Yeah, well, as you said, I'm an environmental historian. That's my kind of academic training. I. I've been at the University of Bristol since my PhD, and I came here because it was a kind of hub of environmental history in the uk. So I knew I studied history as an undergraduate and I kind of happened to go to a lecture by the American historian David Nye, talking about energy, actually hydroelectric dams in America and the technological sublime. And it really kind of stuck with me and kind of opened up environment as a lens for understanding history and made me love history after kind of wondering whether it was the topic for me. So I looked to see where was best to study in the uk, and Bristol was the place. So I was lucky to come here and then stay on to do a PhD as a postdoc. And yes, I've been working here ever since. I mean, my background is, I'm like, I grew up in Cornwall in the uk, which is a very beautiful region of the uk, and I think kind of living so close to very energetic coastlines really imbues a sense of how weather and environment and place really shape kind of your outlook and one's identity too, I suppose. And I think that's probably come through in this book a little bit. I end up going back to Cornwall to look at one of the first wind farms there, for example. So, yeah, that's a little bit about me. I still see myself as an environmental historian, I suppose, more than an energy historian. And I think those things are slightly different. And it's through the environment that I'm really interested in energy and clearly our contemporary context of climate change and kind of the need to kind of move away from fossil fuel systems kind of is really informs this book and all of the work that I do.
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A
Britain, of course, is the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, right? And the Industrial Revolution was mostly fueled by coal. And the use of wind traditionally had been going on for centuries. Windmills and the sails for navigation. We may think that steam engines basically sidelined wind. Is it really so? And what was the role of wind throughout the long process of the Industrial Revolution?
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B
Yeah, that's a good question. Partly because when I set out to write this book as a history of wind, I didn't expect to go back to the Industrial Revolution. I was thinking of it much more as a 20th century history. But as soon as I started to investigate kind of the origins of using wind to extract electricity specifically, I quickly realized I had to go further back and really kind of engage with this period of industrial revolution to unpick how wind energy came about. Kind of modern wind energy, as we understand it, really came about not as an alternative to coal and oil and the fossil fuel systems, but because of it. So investigating this history, I was kind of thinking about the very long, very deep history of using wind as a source of power. And this is kind of traditionally constructed by energy historians as kind of organic wind use, part of the old regime of energy. And yeah, for sure, kind of the arrival of the steam engine really impacts the traditional uses. The use of windmills to pump water from land, for example. I mean, they were quickly replaced by kind of mechanized pumps. And. And we see kind of the movement away from like sailing ships in favor of steamships. But as I kind of discussed in the book, those older uses don't disappear completely. We still see the use of wind in kind of these traditional ways. They don't disappear totally. And what I was so interested in was the kind of quite madcap inventors and engineers in the 19th century who were, on the one hand, kind of deeply engaged with modern, very kind of up to the minute science and technological experimentation with electricity. And then also they were paying attention to these older presences of wind in kind of in technological life, and they were putting the two together. So you start to have people like Charles Brush in the US And William Blythe in Scotland experimenting with how to connect old fashioned wind technology to the new electrical system. And it's there, really in the late 19th century that we see the birth of electric wind, which is kind of the term I arrived at for describing this modern impulse to try and generate electrical power through the kind of organic energy of the wind. And clearly these inventions were not troubling the kind of fossil fuel systems that were being kind of put in place at great speed and at great scale. We're talking about individual inventions here, but nonetheless, the kind of the interest was there. And as I talk about in the book, some of the inventors and engineers were really thinking ahead to a time where these experiments could kind of work alongside these much bigger fossil fuel systems and feed the electrical grids that were becoming part of kind of modern urbanized life in particular. So, yes, lots of engagement with the industrial revolution, despite my best efforts to avoid it.
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A
I think another point you make in the book is the connection between meteorological expertise and technological development. Right. In order to harness the wind, one must know where it blows, basically.
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B
Right. I mean, this turned out to be a really key part of the big picture of electric win for me, partly because I knew from the start that this wasn't going to be simply a story of technological development. There is much more going on here than the development of the machines, the wind turbines and the other machines. So I wanted to really think expansively about what this pursuit of wind energy meant and how it unfolded. And, I mean, the history itself told me that this was about the weather as much as about technical expertise, because there were so many failures in the early stages of wind technology development. And those failures were because wind is such an unpredictable, lively and powerful kind of natural force. So before scientists could really harness it to its full potential, they had to understand how it worked. And they look to the experts, who are the meteorologists, who were operating in the 19th century in kind of lots of different fields. So partly in the uk, kind of working for the Navy, for example, because weather prediction was a military and strategic endeavor. And so what surprised me, I think, in the history here, was that actually there was a huge gap in the knowledge about wind when it came to how it worked. On land, the understanding of wind at sea was much more nuanced and fully developed because of that naval connection. But on land, Even by the 1930s and 40s, we still didn't really know where the windiest place in Britain was. That continues to surprise me because by the 1940s, we're talking Second World War, kind of the development of really sophisticated atomic science, for example. But this question of where the wind blew strongest was still not answered. And so Britain kind of rolled out this national survey of wind and started to plot kind of the nature of wind all around the nation. And I think, unsurprisingly, for anyone who is familiar with the kind of landscape and geography of Britain, it was in the upland hills and the coast that the wind was much stronger and kind of more viable for the use for energy. So we have this really interesting kind of mapping of the wind regime and a beginning of understanding how wind works in relation to land, which is really. It proves really crucial for the development of turbine technology. Early experiments were trying to kind of use wind tunnels and kind of manufacture the conditions of wind turbine. But it soon became clear that testing turbines kind of out in the landscape was key to really understanding how they would work again, because of wind being that really kind of lively and unpredictable feature that they had to grapple with.
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A
Speaking of places. You devote a chapter to the Orkney Islands in Scotland, which is where the first developments of wind generation took place on a scale. Can you tell us something about this archipelago for those outside of Britain who may not be really familiar with it, and why and how it became the birthplace of this wind project?
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B
Yeah. So Orkney, the Orkney Islands are an archipelago just off the northern tip of Scotland and they are where the North Sea meets the Atlantic. So, as you might expect, the meeting of those two oceans kind of generates a lot of movement, both in the waters and in the air. And they're really known for being this place of kind of changeable weather and strong winter storms, lots of waves and tides, and a really beautiful place to visit. I encourage listeners to make it up to Orkney, if they possibly can, because beautiful island, very warm and welcoming people and this amazing culture that is Scottish, but also Scandinavian. They've not always been part of Britain, they've been part of Norway at different times. And they have this kind of really distinct, distinctive culture and language all of their own. They're so important to this history of wind because it's where in 1951. Well, firstly, it's where the wind survey that I just mentioned found to have the strongest wind. So it was there that the north of Scotland Hydroelectric Board, which was the energy provider that was kind of tasked with this challenge of figuring out whether wind could provide power to the national grid in the 1950s. It was there that they decided to place their first test turbine that crucially was connected to the public electricity supply grid in the islands. And I talk a bit about how, in this instance, the islandness of this was useful because it was a very contained grid. The islands are small, their population is small, and not all of the islands had electricity at this point. So they were working with the grid on the main island of Orkney, and it gave them a bit of a simulacrum, if you like, of how wind could feed the national grid at a much larger scale. So that was useful to them. So they put up a turbine, 100 kilowatt turbine, in 1951, and proceeded to test it for a few years under, as I said, really kind of testing and changeable storm conditions. I write in the book a bit about a particular storm that blows through Orkney in 1952, brings with it the strongest winds thus recorded so far in Britain. There have since been stronger winds recorded, but the winds are so strong that it kind of pushed the limits of the turbine technology. And in some ways, the experiments are not Successful because the turbines were constantly having to be as a result of these strong winds. But they proved the principle that turbines could feed power to a national grid and that in the right place there was enough wind to really reliably generate power. That it wasn't kind of always supplementary to other systems, but that there was enough wind in Britain to justify the development of wind, wind technology. So this is a really important place. I kind of thought I would start the book and it's where I started my research. It's kind of the first place where I encountered this history of wind and really gave me the desire, I suppose, to go deeper and to kind of contextualize and really figure out why these experiments were happening in this very remote place that is traditionally kind of much. Yeah, traditionally outside the. The main political discourse of Britain. Orkney is kind of distant in both geography, but also, I guess, in kind of its political importance. This is not a center of power traditionally defined. So the fact that this is all happening in this beautiful wild place really intrigued me.
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A
And the Orkney project was basically a state led intervention. We also talk about kind of bottom up grassroots experimentation with wind power, especially in the 70s when you have the rise of environmentalism, counterculture and wind power is embraced by this cultural movement.
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B
Yeah. So the kind of the Orkney chapter in some ways sets a false scene for the overall history of wind power in the uk. These early experiments really put Britain at the forefront of developments around the world, but they were also kind of not continued through into the 1960s and 70s. So the state kind of turns away from wind energy and loses that kind of early lead and early kind of expertise. And in the gap that follows, it was kind of hippies and hippies and environmentalists who kind of took up wind energy as this potential energy system for kind of living well and lightly on the land. And I particularly focus on this fascinating community who build an off grid commune in an old quarry in the middle of Wales. The Centre for Alternative Technology kind of opened its doors in 1975 and it still exists today. It's kind of evolved a bit, so it's somewhat different now, but it was really an idealistic project to show the world that it was possible to live through the use of alternative technologies such as wind power, hydroelectricity, but also kind of other lifestyle kind of methods like organic gardening, composting, all of these things kind of combined together and they wanted to show other people that these were possible. So they did lots of public outreach and had lots of school visits and thousands of people a year would come and visit the center for Alternative Technology and see their, their wind turbines and other gadgets and methods kind of working. And I think the thing to maybe note about this group is that these were not envisaging wind power in the same way that the state was, that they were not concerned about its capacity to kind of slot into existing power networks and systems. They were really specifically wanting to show its environmental benefits and also to demonstrate that an alternative to the mainstream was possible. They were super anti nuclear power, as many environmentalists were at this time. And so a lot of their publicity and their kind of archive, archival materials really emphasised how wind and other renewables kind of offered a chance to step away from what they saw as this really kind of threatening reliance on nuclear power in Britain. So they were political in that they were actively working against certain systems and politics, but they were also kind of very practical. They were really about generating their own technical skills when it came to wind turbines. They built their own wind turbines and offered kind of self help books for other people who wanted to go and build wind turbines too. And that expertise did them in good stead when eventually a commercial wind sector got off the ground in the UK because actually because the state hadn't been developing wind energy to any large degree, they had the technical expertise to be going out and installing and fixing wind turbines. And so some of the members of that group became really successful wind entrepreneurs by the late 80s and early 90s. So that was an interesting development to that story. But yes, I became quite fascinated by this group living in mid Wales. It wasn't an easy life for sure. And some of them really kind of comment on that in their recollections of living kind of close to the ground, as it were. Wales is wet and rainy and cold at times and I think sometimes life was hard. But you also get a real sense of kind of community and a belief in the principles that they were living by, which was really interesting to write about. Refreshing Wild cherry cola meets smooth cream, the treat you deserve. Pepsi Wild cherry and cream treat yourself.
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A
So you just mentioned briefly the market turn of electricity. So in the late 80s, late Thatcher era, the electricity sector is privatized in Britain and power generation becomes effectively a marketable commodity. What does this mean for wind power in general?
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B
Yeah, this is a really important moment for the development of a wind sector to move away from it being the kind of domain of quirky inventors and engineers and kind of alternative grids. It's the kind of pivotal moment, I guess, in it becoming a Mainstream energy supply. What the privatization of electricity meant was that for the first time, the prospect of selling electricity to the national grid became a reality. And this was something that Greece, like the center for Alternative Energy, had been advocating for for a long time. So that it made it kind of commercially viable to, to buy or build a wind turbine and to then kind of sell that electricity back to the national system. As I know, you know, Filippo, from your work, it's all a lot more complicated than that. And it was kind of from. From the very start, because Britain's energy system was complicated. Electricity was generated by burning coal, burning gas, and also through nuclear power. And Thatcher had a real problem when she privatized the electricity system because the nuclear power stations were incredibly expensive and the power that they would sell to the grid just wasn't competitive in the new electrical marketplace. And so she had to introduce policy mechanisms to kind of protect the nuclear power stations and the electricity that they supplied. And what the wind energy advocates were really quick to do was to include wind energy in the non fossil fuel category that was set aside for nuclear power at this time. And they were supported by the EU in this. This is something that the EU was encouraging to. To also do. And so built into this new marketized power system was a kind of caveat that every energy supplier had to buy a small proportion of its power from a non fossil fuel source. It's called the non fossil fuel obligation. And it's really this policy designed for nuclear power that became so important for the kind of emergent wind industry. It gave them a way in to the national markets, essentially. And from there we begin to see wind scale up from kind of small turbines or individual installations to the wind farms which characterize wind energy for much of us today. And so a point that I make in the book is that these wind farms are really shaped by these market conditions in the early 90s. The fact that we have wind farms and that they are the kind of dominant model of wind energy today is the product of the marketized electricity system. And I think, you know, there's a lot to kind of from it from a historian's perspective, I think there's a lot to unpick there because it shows us that these wind farms are not the only model, they're not the only possibility for wind, and that if we wanted to reshape wind for different reasons, there are other models available to us. But kind of absolutely without question, it is this kind of, this move to commercial, the commercialization of power in the early 90s that opens up wind as this kind of sector that is going to really help Britain move away from a reliance on coal, which was getting much more expensive, and nuclear power, which was beginning to get aged and increasingly expensive.
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A
In the book, you talk extensively about opposition to wind power. While reading it, I couldn't help but think of Donald Trump's speech at Davos a couple of weeks ago, where, among other things, he went on a rant against wind turbines, saying that they are unreliable, ugly, they kill birds and so on. And these arguments are not new and they have accompanied the history of the sector for a while.
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B
Right, yeah, you and me both, Filippo. I was kind of listening to that speech by Trump with fascination, and he has a really interesting connection with wind energy in Britain. He fought against wind installations in Scotland, where his golf courses are. So that's actually something that I'm going to kind of look into a little bit more. But, yeah, opposition. It felt to me that the opposition to wind energy has shaped its development as much as the kind of really passionate advocacy that has also been demonstrated by different groups through the period that I cover. So, kind of opposition to wind in the cases that I look at go all the way back to that Industrial Revolution period, kind of in the late 1800s, hundreds, when James Blythe was introducing a wind turbine to his community in Merrikirk in Scotland, and he asked them if they wanted electricity generated by the wind, and they turned him down because they thought it was the work of the devil. So he took the terre byne elsewhere, to the local asylum, in fact, who were much more accepting of wind energy. But it was really the growth of wind energy in this later period as a commercial sector and as I said, in the form of wind farms, that starts to kind of generate bigger, noisier protests. And what I wanted to do in the book was to really show, perhaps particularly for readers coming to this, who are interested in wind and technology and energy, but maybe are not necessarily connecting them with kind of histories of landscape and identity and these other kind of things that constitute the focus of a lot of my work. And I really wanted to show readers that these protests were not just about kind of the arrival of new technology in the landscape. They were tapping into much kind of deeper concerns about change and about place, about the nature of modern Britain, and kind of all these tensions coming together that became focused in protests around wind turbines. So you have some really interesting kind of articulations of both why wind turbines are a positive presence in the countryside according to certain groups, people like Farmers, for example, who see them as a way to modernize what they do and to kind of extract a living from the land. And then you have consent by other people who are worried about the impact on the visual landscape and on the ability for people to move through the landscape for recreational purposes and that kind of thing. And some of the organizations that kind of protect British landscape joined protests against wind farms. So the cpre, the Council for the Protection of Rural England, for example, protested a lot of wind farms. There's also a politics to this which I unpick, that as kind of environmental issues and the environmental dimension of wind power becomes more significant towards the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. The politics becomes more polarized around them. And we see a more distinctive kind of characterization of wind energy as being to the left politically and aligned with kind of leftist concerns around the environment. And thus opposition becomes quite characterized and utilized by right wing political parties as a way into a rural voting base. And I think that's, you know, thinking back to the other chapters, that's a real contrast, for example, to like Thatcher, who was embracing kind of a non fossil fuel sources of power. So those political divides were not predetermined, but they really become much clearer in the later period that I look at in the book that leads us to Donald Trump today for sure.
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A
So so far we mostly talked about land based wind turbines, but possibly the most important or the most promising side of the industry is offshore. What can you tell us about its development?
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B
Yeah, I couldn't really write a book about wind power without devoting a chapter to the offshore because it's become such an important space in the British context, but also elsewhere for developing wind energy at scales that are kind of unimaginable on land. We're talking about like hundreds of wind turbines at a time. And the scale is important that these are all helping us to lower our kind of carbon, the carbon footprint, I guess, of our energy systems. So the offshore space is really, really important. But I want to kind of challenge, I think, a common assumption that the ocean space, the offshore, is this blank space where wind turbines can be installed without any issues at all. It's not the case. And that idea of the ocean as this kind of blank space, space is itself really historical. And so I think wind turbines add a new dimension to really old debates going all the way back to kind of European colonization about the right to develop the oceans and kind of which nations get which bits of the sea. And I draw attention, I suppose, to the way that this worked in Britain, which is that the Crown owns the seabed. And so in the kind of auctions that are the system of granting permissions for new offshore wind energies, it's the British Crown that kind of really makes a lot of the money. The money goes to. Most of the money goes to the government, but the crown keeps a really big chunk. So there are some very kind of traditional issues playing into very new kind of carving up of ocean space. I also want to use the opportunity to think about the technology of the wind turbine and the wind farm in the offshore space, I think to critique a little bit some of the maybe naive assumptions about wind turbine technology as always being benign, that kind of the technological developments that wind turbines continue in the offshore space and in some ways are accelerated by the ability to kind of observe and to experiment in the sea in ways that companies cannot do on land because there are much stricter regulations. There's really good work being done by scientists and sociologists on this, which I draw on in my book, kind of showing the kind of the ways that the offshore space allows companies to kind of say that they're going to do something innovative because there's no real way of knowing whether or not it will work. And so they kind of experiment with the use of drones and the use of surveillance technology and do some really kind of interesting work around, like pausing turbines to allow migrations of birds, for example. But because kind of birds fall into the sea when they're hit by turbines, we still really don't know how many birds are killed in the offshore space. So I suppose, to kind of summarize, there's an awful lot going on offshore when it comes to wind energy technology, and a lot of it is out of sight by design. And I suppose I don't want to let offshore wind off the hook to that extent, because what is done out to sea impacts what we do with wind energy on land, too. And it impacts lots of other kind of areas of technology, surveillance, the military use of technology, for example, that I think we need to be attentive to and not assume that just because the company says it's doing clean energy, it's doing it for the good of. All right.
- [36:10]
A
The final chapter of the book is a little different from the previous ones. It is called Energy Imaginaries. And here you draw a few suggestions, a few reflections from history that could help us conceptualize and frame better the role of wind power in the future.
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B
Yeah, I allow myself a bit of room to think. I think in this final chapter, it's where I'm. I suppose I'm being less of a historian kind of drawing out examples from the past and maybe leaning into a more kind of energy humanity space in which you can be a little bit more speculative and even playful with some of this history. Because it's about thinking about how some of the history that I unpick in the book opens up different possibilities for the future. And that's always an act of speculation and uncertainty. But I thought it was an important thing to do here because as I mentioned, with the kind of the rise of like what is sometimes characterized as big wind, the kind of very corporate model of wind energy, you know, there are problems with that. There are communities that are adversely affected. To draw an example from the Orkney Islands, for example, huge wind energy capacity in the islands, but really fundamental kind of material constraints that they're having to grapple with, like interconnectors not big enough to pass all of the electricity over to the mainland, means that a lot of the wind turbines are shut down. More importantly than that even I think, is that the fact that people on Orkney and the Hebrides and other places that I look at in the book are experiencing kind of severe fuel poverty despite the presence of all these wind turbines in the situation. Extraordinarily productive wind regime. The benefits of having wind energy in their landscapes is not trickling down to their experience of energy. They're paying, you know, really high prices for the power that they're having to use to heat their homes. So the system is working on the one hand in that, you know, increasing amounts of wind energy are being produced and this is all helping towards reaching goals of net zero. But on the other hand, the system's not working because a lot of people are not experiencing the benefits that could be drawn from a wind energy system that's redesigned along more equitable lines, I think. So in this chapter on energy imaginaries, I play with some of the alternative models, I guess in the spirit of the hippies in the quarry in Wales a bit. I kind of think about these alternatives and what they could offer. An energy system that supports wind energy, but does so not necessarily for the benefits of shareholders and rather for the people that live in the places that experience all the wind. So one thing I found particularly inspiring going to places like the Hebrides for my research was encountering community owned wind turbine models that work with the current national grid system of energy supply, electricity supply. But instead of funneling the profits from the wind turbines off out of the island into banks and shareholder accounts. The profits go into community funds that then support other development that people can really experience and see the benefit and I think make the connection between the wind energy that's being generated on the horizon with the energy that's being consumed in their homes and in their daily lives. So I work with that idea of the community wind model in that chapter to think about wind as this very inspiring history. We've achieved so much in this area, but that there's so much more still to do. And that kind of the story of wind doesn't just need to end now with this like very kind of monocultural model of the wind farm that we see everywhere. I think it would be to the good if governments, for example, were more open to supporting and funding some of these alternative models of wind to really open up the possibilities of the sector and to kind of connect people with the production of electricity in a more direct way.
- [41:03]
A
Yes, I agree. I think that the idea of a soft energy path, a more distributed and democratic energy system, it appears more and more as a broken promise of decarbonization. And that's why I think we need more historiography on renewable energy. Books like yours can give a contribution to the debate on energy scenarios. So thank you again for writing it. Before we go, I have a final question. What are you working on at the moment? What is your next project?
- [41:39]
B
Yeah, good question, Filippo. I am thinking about that a lot at the moment as like, I really enjoyed writing this book and I'm looking forward to kind of thinking about what I might do next. And actually we've touched on an area that I would really like to look into more, which is the kind of connection between wind energy and right wing politics and populism in kind of the global north, particularly at the moment. I think there's more to do there to unpick why wind has become this target of people like Trump, but also Farage in Britain and so on, and really understand why it's been vilified as this kind of by the right in this way and to think about what that means for kind of future energy systems as well. I think it's important to look into that in more detail. So that's something I plan to do. I am also fascinated still by these, not just by the center for Alternative Technology, but by the emergence of these quite kind of radical groups in the 1970s who were enacting a kind of environmental ideology of the time that draws on lots of influences from like North America, but also from India. And the east and bringing them all together. And in Britain kind of that kind of manifests in some quite weird and wonderful ways. And it is also the emergence of a like, more formal green politics. So I'd like to understand that or a bit better. But I think between those two areas, my time will be kept busy for the next few months or years maybe.
- [43:23]
A
Wonderful. All I can say is may the wind fill your sails and really look forward to reading your next books. Thank you so much, Mariana.
- [43:36]
B
Thanks so much,
- [43:43]
A
Sam.