Turbine Testing

The winds picked up on Saturday afternoon enough to start our turbine and it was off and running. It calmed again on Sunday morning with a forecast for high winds the next three days. By noon on Sunday the wind was up to 20 knots and our turbine was running full tilt boogie. In the first 24 hour period we generated 32 kWh. By 5:00 PM today our total production was 50kWh. To put this in perspective the Forfar Shop, Dive Compressor, and Office combined consume around 300 kWh/month. Yeah!!! We could not have asked for better conditions for testing our turbine. The students are all very proud of our accomplishment. Here a couple of videos of the turbine in action.

Assemblying the Turbine

After completing our assembly we raised the tower on Thursday. The turbine was not yet attached, as this was a test raise to plumb the tower, and adjust all the guy wires. It was also an opportunity for us to develop confidence that we could raise and lower the tower with our rigging and machines.

Confident that the tower was going to go up and down just fine, we began assembly of the turbine. Pictured here we have Henry Lavine demonstrating a Sumo turbine wrestling move. I don't think they show this in the Skystream assembly manual, but it worked.

By close of the day we had our final preparations done, and knocked off early to present our energy audit findings to the staff.