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Editor: Debbie Levey
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Micro wind turbines planned for power, water purification

As a prelude to the annual MIT $50K competition held in May, the MIT $1K Warm-Up Award in December gives student entrepreneurs a chance to display their technology and business strengths. This year's winner in the global markets category was blueEnergy, a team headed by CEE grad student Mathias Craig, whose project on micro wind turbines for Latin America stemmed from his long-time interest in wind power and strong family connections to Nicaragua.

"In the fall 2002 semester I took a class, MAS.965 Entrepreneurship in the Developing World, taught by Prof. Alex Pentland and Joost Bonsen in the Media Lab. I worked out a proposal to the $1K competition with Ricardo Jiminez from the Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, who is getting a masters in international development, and Rolo Duartes from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I'll be graduating in May with an SM in Information Technology, so right now we're attempting to line up some funding for a feasibility study over the summer." The project targets Nicaragua as the original country, with the turbines hopefully spreading through Latin America.

The project has two parts: manufacturing the turbines, and then using some of the wind power for an effective, cheap water purification system. Craig describes the power generators as "a very low cost, micro wind turbine design." Producing 100 to 500 watts, "it's definitely not enough to power an American home, but it could sustain a few lights in a rural home" which would otherwise have no electricity at all. "We don't want to take a high tech design from a lab at MIT and try to cut it down to a developing country, where the technical capacity to build and maintain it doesn't exist. This design doesn't require clean rooms or super high tech equipment. Local auto mechanics who have a fundamental knowledge of power tools and maybe some basic electronics could take a one- or two-month training course on how to build and maintain these systems."

blueEnergy intends to target towns with some local technical capacity, and set up a small-scale local manufacturing center to produce turbines. Communities which are too small to sustain manufacturing will be likely places for installing the finished turbines.

In addition to providing lights, the turbines would be very useful for running centralized battery-charging centers. "Many people have batteries in their homes for operating a few lights. When the batteries run down, the owner might have to travel 30 or 40 miles over rudimentary roads or canoe on rivers to the nearest town to recharge them. That's relatively expensive, and the travel cost, in terms of lost time, is also great." More widely distributed local charging centers run by wind turbines could provide a major savings in time, money, and human energy.

Pairing the wind power with water purification would take advantage of a new, extremely low-cost ultraviolet light water purification technology. Craig plans to work with Prof. Ashok Gadgil, his former advisor from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, and a native of India. "During an outbreak of cholera in India a few years ago, he developed this UV water purification system. The biggest problem is that the system is most urgently needed in remote areas, but it requires reliable electric power to run the UV light. He cited wind and solar power as the best options."

The advantage of wind over solar power in this case is that solar power components cannot be manufactured locally in small remote communities. While the utility-sized windmills found on commercial wind farms would also be too complicated, the much simpler micro turbines would be quite feasible to build and operate.

The group honed in on Latin America in general through teammates Jiminez from Colombia and Duartes from Cuba, and on Nicaragua specifically because Craig's mother, Colette Grinevald, has been working there for 30 years. A linguist trained at MIT, she has longstanding personal connections throughout the country, including contacts at the Univ. at Bluefields on the Atlantic coast. Bluefields will be the first target market, since it's fairly large (around 44,000 people), has technically trained people, and is located somewhat near a number of Indian communities where the turbines could be transported.

Since Craig must finish his SM thesis by May 2003, "There's a limit to how much we'll be able to do before then. We'd like to start setting up business alliances and raising money so that in the summer we can travel to Nicaragua, establish a simple shop to build a few prototypes, start training people and setting up the turbines. We could start gathering data on the construction process, realistic costs, what materials can we get locally and what must we import, and how to set up the whole infrastructure."

Wind power research at MIT stretches back to 1939, when Civil Engineering Dept. head John Wilbur was chief engineer of the Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine Project in Vermont. As the world's first effort to derive energy from the wind by means of a very large machine operating on an electric utility network, it produced 1100 hours of on-line power over 3.5 years.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, MIT faculty, including Woodie Flowers in Mechanical Engineering and his student, Jerome Hendler, Jr., and Univ. of Mass. researchers were pioneers in high technology windmills for utility scale wind power. While the funding and research dried up in the US under two Republican administrations from 1980 to 1992, the windpower industry flourished in Europe. Turbines manufactured by Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark now produce almost all the electricity generated by wind around the world, according to Technology Review, and Denmark reaps about 20% of its energy from wind.

In contrast, the US Dept. of Energy's Wind Powering America program considers it optimistic to predict that wind power will provide 5% of the nation's electricity by 2020.

China actively manufactures and markets a six-bladed micro turbine specifically to Mongolian nomads in that country, notes Craig. "It's small enough to be taken apart, thrown on the back of a horse, moved, and set up to charge the battery in their tent." Their original 1K business plan group included a student whose professor at the Univ. of Hawaii had collaborated with the Chinese to build these micro wind turbines. However, the student left the class, and the group's focus switched to Latin America.

blueEnergy plans to develop a three-bladed micro turbine with each blade roughly 4 ft (1.2 m) long. Given a sufficient population density and a source of income to pay for the project, "we could build a mini-grid and electrify several houses together. But electrifying a single house by one wind turbine, or a community battery charging and water purification center with multiple wind turbines, will more generally be our model for the power system," assumes Craig.

Linked to the wind turbines, the water purification system would service 1000 people for $70 per year. Craig points out that this method is extremely inexpensive compared to disinfecting water with ozone or chlorine, and doesn't involve importing, transporting, or generating toxic chemicals. "The main technical consideration is an ultraviolet lightbulb, which would have to be imported originally. It might be possible to manufacture those locally as well. A 40-watt bulb doesn't use much power to clean water for 1000 people." While the water purification system will be targeted for small communities, Craig says that Ashok Gadgil is also working on building a smaller, scaled-down unit that could sanitize water for a household (around 10 people).

The lead technical advisor on this project is "the godfather of micro wind turbine design, Hugh Piggott, who lives in northwest Scotland, totally off the commercial electric grid. The whole community where he lives is powered by micro wind turbines," says Craig.

As one of the 10 winners out of 125 applicants in the $1K competition, Craig and colleagues have received useful feedback from venture capitalists and business people who serve as panel judges. "They encouraged us to talk to them afterwards. It's an open invitation to review our business model and get more technical. We want to be a sustainable business, not a charity organization."