California might have been the planetary center of wind energy in the mid-1980s, but their turbines were more machines for churning out visions of greener futures than actual watts. The buy-yourself-a-wind-turbine plan had become so appealing that, in Cashman’s words, “an awful lot of machines were put up that were worthless.” Nobody, at least no one in America, had figured out how to build an industrial grade wind turbine. What we’d figured out instead was how to finance them. The state-of-the-art turbines during those early heady days were, in Cashman’s words, “prototypes” that,
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