In November 2023, Katie Dawson and Megan Phillips interviewed Peter Musgrove (founder of the British Wind Energy Association, now known as Renewable UK.
An excerpt from this interview is inserted below.
To access the full transcript or 2 hour audio file, email rachel.riddell@millsarchive.org.
___________________________
“Katie: (0:00) Okay, so I’m Katie, this is Megan, and we’re students from the University of Reading. (0:10) And we’re here on a placement, an archive placement, and we’ve been creating an educational pack about renewable energy, (0:20) aimed for school kids. We’ve been making a debate about pros and cons of wind and water energy.
(0:31) And whilst we were looking through the material they have here, your name came up quite a lot. (0:37) So we’re very excited to actually meet you after reading all about you. (0:44) So, what do you want to talk about? (0:46) Yeah, no, so, just obviously we don’t know you that well.
(0:49) No, no. (0:49) So we were just wondering if you could just give us a brief overview of how you got interested in wind energy and what was…
Peter: (0:58) Well, yeah, I mean, I did an aeronautical engineering degree at Southampton University, briefly joined the aircraft industry. (1:12) But then this was in 1966, universities were expanding, and Reading University was one of those.
(1:19) So I joined what was then a very new department, which became the engineering department. (1:27) Sadly, it no longer exists as such.
Megan: (1:30) Oh dear.
Peter: (1:31) But, partly because it’s gone. (1:37) But anyway, we, as a young department, and the head of the department, a man called Peter Dunn, was keen on, I think he knew Schumacher quite well, of Small is Beautiful, (1:53) and very keen on alternative technology. (1:58) So, I mean, like most people who are interested in alternatives to fossil fuels, got very strongly stimulated by the 1973 oil crisis, which was awful at the time.
(2:18) It came as quite a shock to the world as a whole, because in the post-war years, as the oil fields of the Middle East, the magnitude became apparent. (2:30) People had got into the, you know, the general presumption was that energy was cheap, it was going to stay cheap for the foreseeable future. (2:40) And at that time, not many, well, almost nobody was jumping up and down worrying about climate change.
(2:47) It was all about energy supply security, and the 1973 oil crisis came as a massive shock. (2:54) And that stimulated governments around the world to commence renewable energy programmes. (3:02) Did this influence your research? (3:05) Well, as I say, I joined the new department in 1966, I was only one year old, and I joined to lecture on the fluid flow side, because, you know, the airflow and water flows and things like that.
(3:20) And by the time I’d sort of set up laboratories and lectured courses and then got into research, my initial energy research was related to something called, well, (3:32) it was a way of making conventional fossil fuel power stations significantly more efficient. (3:40) It was something called electric gas dynamics, which you won’t have heard of, but very few people have, even if they’ve got an engineering background. (3:49) But I, you know, had an interest in energy matters, if you like.
(3:55) But being, as I say, growing up enthusiastic about aviation, anything that turned, you know, that interacted with the wind was of interest to me. (4:03) And in fact, about 1970, 71, I got some students to do some work on boomerangs, for example, which are also an example of the way in which aerodynamics is important.
[See Throwing Machine by Peter Musgrove : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xROk-iHNOw]
(4:20) But, and interestingly, I discovered, you know, in supervising student work, one has to dig a bit oneself so that one can guide. (4:30) And I was quite surprised to find, for example, that ancient Egyptians also had boomerangs. (4:37) And I had the opportunity via the Egyptologist at the British Museum to go out to Cairo to handle his boomerang. (4:44) So it was, so when the renewable energy, when the energy crisis occurred, I sort of started thinking more about what wind possibility is.
(4:57) And whereas I wasn’t the only one, I was quite lucky in having a head of department who was not dismissive and in fact, who was supportive. (5:10) And of course, as I say, I’ve got, you know, no colleagues who are at other universities who really had to struggle to, you know, be allowed to work on something as stupid as renewable energy. (5:21) So it was stupid.
(5:22) Oh yeah, it was pointless. You know, you had a few cranks around the country who would go about with their sandals and long hair and mess about with oil drums cut in half to make savonish rotors and things like that. (5:39) But as far as the proper engineering community was concerned, it was laughable.
(5:46) So anyway, because of the head of department’s interest in renewable, in alternative technology, Schumacher’s objective was to try and get the transfer of appropriate technology from the developed world to developing countries, (6:06) rather than sending them stuff that they can’t maintain, they can’t use. (6:10) So he was interested, you know, there was something called the Intermediate Technology Power Group, IT Power, and they set up a number of panels to look at particular alternatives and they set up a wind panel. (6:31) I got involved in that in 1974 when it started.
Katie: (6:34) So would you say that the environment at Reading University attributed to…
Peter: (6:38) The environment, yes, absolutely. I didn’t have to fight against the system at Reading, whereas I know I had colleagues at other universities who did have to fight against the system.
(7:26) But yes, so I got involved in this wind panel, which meant that, because this was pre-Google days, so to find out what was going on relied on people and on reports that different places published. (7:39) So through this wind panel I got sent and given copies of documents.
(7:50) The chairman of that wind panel at the time was a man called Arthur Stoddart, who was from the Electrical Research Association at Leatherhead, who had been involved in an early attempt in the late 1940s in the UK to explore the possibility of wind power. (8:15) So they were, this is because in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, again, and before the magnitude of the oil reserves in the Middle East were appreciated, there was again concern about energy supply security. (8:33) We in other countries sort of spent a bit of money for just a small number of years to looking at alternatives, including wind…”
