INTRODUCTION

1 August 1995

In the days when wind energy was an experimental technology, being tested under a few government research programmes, “uåX˜äŠÊ˜·³Ç was less than half the size it is today. Keeping track of who was doing what and where in these pages was then a relatively simple task. Now, with 4000 MW of wind turbines turning around the world, the industry growing rapidly, new markets springing up almost overnight, and the whole structure of energy supply undergoing fundamental change, the flow of information is fed by thousands of tributaries. Over the past 12 months, “uåX˜äŠÊ˜·³Ç's monitoring of this flow and retrieval of relevant news has resulted in 250,000 words of information presented in several hundred articles.

Finding a particular piece of information in this welter of words is time consuming and often frustrating. To simplify the task, we have compiled a detailed subject index of the past 12 issues. Every major article has been condensed into a succinct abstract and listed chronologically by subject and country.

The index has other uses, too. For wind-watchers it presents the opportunity to browse through a whole year of wind energy happenings in just an hour or two; our grouping of articles in subject categories reveals some telling geographical and industrial trends. The index also makes it easier to follow the convolutions of news stories which run over several months by grouping abstracts of them in one place, be they accounts of technical, market, political or project progress.

As with all attempts to categorise information, devising a format which is simple to use but also sufficiently comprehensive to be logical, is no easy task. Some of the decisions about where to list information are inevitably arbitrary and build as much on instinct as logic; other articles contain a mix of information which straddles two or three categories, but for reasons of space and simplicity are placed in one. If you have problems finding an article or specific information, our new computerised reference and article service can help (see page 55).