Wind turbine

Our homemade wind turbine on campus. It only generates a bit of energy, but is regulated and grid connected. Not bad for a group of students. This was taken during a workshop where we aimed to assess the scale of damage and repairs required. Looks like we have a lot of work to carry out to get it running next term. In the mean time I have a block of extremely strong magnets in my room which I have to keep away from my electronics.

As an aside, this is the same unit that 4 of our members built in Tanzania as part of a rural electrification project. A big issue for these projects is long term benefits; often there is no sense of community ownership, so usually, things like this are used until they break and then are forgotten about. In an attempt to combat that, we have contacts on the ground there, the community does a large proportion of the production, and is taught about the turbine. This is part of a 5 year partnership with the community, so, that means that the team for the coming summer will be visiting the same community.

Unfortunately this doesn't necessarily address the issue of the declawing and corruption of government that is all too often aggravated by charity work. I would hope that this problem is avoided in our project, as we are not replacing work that could feasibly done by the government as rural electrification is prohibitively expensive and not prioritised. This is with good reason, the cost of energy for this project was in the realm of tens of thousands of pounds per MW, contrasted to the UK at £45 per MW.