The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

William Kamkwamba is from Malawi. At the age of 14 he was forced to abandon his schooling because his family could no longer afford to pay his tuition after struggling through one of Malawi's worst famines. Not wanting to miss out, William followed his friends school notes, and read from his villages library. After reading a book called "Explaining Physics" where he learnt about electricity, and seeing the dynamo on his fathers friends bicycle, a photograph of a windmill in another book gave William the idea to construct a windmill for his home.

He did this using, wait for it....a broken bicycle frame, a rusted shock absorber for a shaft, a tractor fan for a rotor, ball bearings, and melted down PVC pipes for blades. He rigged it all up on a frame made of gum tree wood, fired it up, and held a glowing light bulb in his hands. Not too bad for a 14-year old boy. Since then he has made a number of improvements, including a car battery to store electricity, a circuit breaker made from nails and speaker magnets, and hand made light switches. He installed lights in all the rooms of his family's home, and has since added a solar panel on the roof. Seeing the benefits this made to his family, he extended his know-how to his whole village, of which every home now has a solar panel and battery for energy storage. The town now has a wind-powered pump for irrigation, and a pump powered well!

His book "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" was one of Amazon.com's top science books of 2009, he has spoken at many conferences, including the prestigious TED conference, has started a blog, and has recently returned to school at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg where he is studying with the dream of starting his own company to install windmills across Africa.

To gain this knowledge from nothing and to go from building a single windmill, to powering your whole village, to taking the first step towards creating a whole industry in your region is truly remarkable. It shows what can be achieved with some ingenuity and determination. We have that in bucket loads in this country - there is no reason why people, companies, and governments can't do the same here.

Powerhouse Wind Ltd.

An interesting article came up in my feed this morning, and follows on nicely from the CleanTech post last week. The article is published in Idealog, an excellent NZ magazine that showcases some great kiwi ideas, across business, design, science and the web etc. Check it out if you get the chance.

Powerhouse Wind Limited are a Dunedin based company working in the area of wind turbines. The team have a background in desiging high-volume, mass-market consumer products (some of them are ex-Fisher & Paykel) and they've used these skills to develop a small scale wind turbine capable of powering a household.

Their design is radically different to most already available in that it only has one blade with two counterweights, while most have three blades. There are several benefits to this - the turbine can align itself more efficiently to the wind, and that it is quieter. With an average wind speed of about 5-6 meters per second, the turbine can generate about 3,200 kWh, which is enough to power an energy efficient house. The target price is $20,000, which seems high but if you work it out it is a good investment over time. My flat spends about $200 a month on power (I think), so it will pay for itself in 8 years, not to mention the savings you make by selling surplus electricity generated back into the grid.

I think this is a really clever approach, as it builds upon the trend toward a distributed energy generation system, where the energy is generated on-site with minimal energy lost in its transmission, unlike centralised generation (wind farms for example) that transmit over long distances and inefficiently. If one day everyone is generating their own power, Powerhouse Wind will be sitting in a good position, having amassed years and years of experience ahead of a field that currently only seems to be interested in large scale turbines for big wind farms. I wish them luck!

Would you buy one?