Assembly required: Hands-on participation at Creating Energy
From discussions around Artificial Intelligence in permitting, to water security, economic development, education and different types of energy found in the BC Peace Region, attendees had a very full day at the annual Creating Energy Conference in Fort St. John.
This year, the conference went beyond information, discussion and networking, when Rob van Adrichem, Patricia Lightburn and Ryan Gander, during their Renewable Energy 101 session provided an opportunity for hands-on experimentation with wind and solar power.
Half the attendees built and tested miniature solar panels, while the other half took up the challenge of assembling and testing wind turbines. Framed as a competition, groups worked to determine how to get the most power out of their experiments. The “winner” being the group whose model generated the most electricity.
The group I was in was one of those that was assigned the task of building a wind turbine, and determining which permutations produced the most electricity. We were given three different sizes of “turbine blades” and tried different arrangements, while measuring the output with a multimeter. The wind was provided via a box fan.
Once the official experiment was completed, we had some time left and our group’s biologist-turned-engineer for the experiment, egged on by others in the group, built a Franken-bine, using every blade available. It caught a lot of wind, but suffered a catastrophic failure, dropping blades all over the table. Clearly, there’s a good reason why real wind turbines only have three blades. Not twelve.