“On a helicopter,” Cashman explains, “you need lightness because you have to get off the ground, but you don’t want lightness in a wind turbine. Heavy is what you want, brute force, and another thing—when a helicopter goes in the air it has a chance to move with big movements of wind whereas a turbine can’t … it’s just standing there beating its brains out against the wind all the time … and there were other problems too: flexibility of joints and everything; wind turbines don’t need that either.” Since the helicopter guys had the wrong theory, once they got to the trial and error phase of
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