In the two years between my high school graduation and his, I called my friend Tony pretty regularly to make sure he hadn’t lost his mind at our tiny boarding school in northern Maine. Shortly after I left for college, Tony was inspired by a
in Mars Hill to learn as much as he could about
. It sounded like the snow might have finally gotten to him, but at least he was keeping busy.
Over the last year and a half he explained all the math he learned from piles of textbooks in order to design the windmill and its circuitry. I had to hold the phone away from my ear when he got $1000 from a company to actually build the thing. The school promised him some space to work on it. When it turned out he couldn’t put it up on school grounds, one of the teachers offered to let him put it up on her farm.
Through all this explaining and excited yelling, I’m glad that my consistent response was: “Don’t forget to document it.” If you don’t document your work, how will anyone ever really understand it?
Tony documented it alright. The same day that he posted the documentation, it was featured on Instructables. Yesterday the windmill was featured on Make Magazine’s blog. Today I have the privilege of showing you his final product on Boing Boing Gadgets. Here he is telling it like it is to the local news:
Tony’s windmill is sweet in more ways than just that he did it with a $1000 budget, or that he did it in his junior and senior years of high school. Tony made the windmill using lots of waste material from local metal shops, including a strut from the axel of an old Volvo for the windmill’s rotor. He convinced Stantech Engineering that his project was worth funding and organized people to help him set the base and put up the finished windmill.
Most importantly, Tony’s project demonstrates that clean energy is more achievable than you think.
“right now, the windmill that cost one thousand dollars to make powers a single light bulb”
just sounded funny when she said it…
Well done. Great way to learn about engineering, financing, construction and project management but….
It absolutely does not demonstrate that “…clean energy is more achievable than you think.”. Significant clean energy (in a GHG mitigation sense)is a lot less achievable than people think. It is hard and it is expensive. It involves massive trade-offs. The only chance for success (and it’s a slim one) is with investment in very large scale industrial clean energy schemes where economies of scale have a chance of making clean energy commercially viable before it is too late. All the effort spent on off-grid, small scale stuff is wasted, other than as publicity and training. “If we all do a little, we achieve little.” We all need to do a lot.
Dean: Re: The image linked to in the text reading “nearby wind farm”
Sorry if this is off-topic, but do you know if some type of HDR effect has been applied to that pic? If so, I’d really like to know how it was done, as it’s fairly tasteful, and very dramatic.
#1 – Zikman:
“right now, the windmill that cost one thousand dollars to make powers a single light bulb”
Around these parts, electricity costs about 6 cents a kWh, so assuming these “100W light bulbs” cost 0.5 cents per hour to light, it’ll take 166,667 hours before it pays itself off, or roughly 20 years.
@3 My camera took that picture, so I know all the details.
That’s not an HDR picture. I was using a wide angle 10-20mm lens with a polarizing filter on it. The filter is what’s causing the cool colors. The sky’s blue is polarized light, so the filter will change its color as it lets in certain angles of light.
That’s pretty much it. Just get yourself a polarizing filter and play around with it! That’s me standing next to the windmill by the way.
ust sounded funny when she said it…
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“right now, the windmill that cost one thousand dollars to make powers a single light bulb”
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small scale stuff is wasted, other than as publicity and training. “If we all do a little, we achieve little.”
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