By combining proven and promising wind, solar, and other clean and renewable energy technologies, individuals, businesses, and communities can invest in equipment to produce electricity for themselves. This book explains how to reduce reliance on power companies, restore market forces, increase economic security, create jobs, improve efficiency, and reduce waste._x000D_For more than 100 years, electric energy has been a fundamental feature of human existence. It powers our tools, which helps us achieve our many individual and societal wants, needs, and goals. This comprehensive survey explores how electric power generation in the United States began, largely as a private endeavor, and quickly evolved into a race to capture and control its release to the people. The combination of wind, solar, and other renewable energy technologies, as proposed, enables people to restore their ability to independently generate electricity for home and business use. AUTHOR: Craig Toepfer has worked at the forefront of the energy revolution his entire professional life. He studied and collected every wind generator from the 1930s and '40s, along with a myriad of associated equipment. In the 1970s he was at the first gathering of the American Wind Energy Association in Detroit, and joined Windworks, a well known developer of renewable energy technologies. Later, at the M. L. Jacobs Wind Electric Co. in Minneapolis, he managed a stand-alone, hybrid power system for his new 20-kilowatt wind generator. Now retired, he lives in Dearborn, Michigan.
