An image of a desert with dramatically cloudy skies. In the middle of the image is a series of clay doorways with vertically-oriented wooden slats surrounding a central pole. These form the basis of a panemone windmill.

Help Wanted: Keep The World’s Oldest Windmills Turning

November 7, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 36 Comments

While the Netherlands is the country most known for its windmills, they were originally invented by the Persians. More surprisingly, some of them are still turning after 1,000 years.

The ancient world holds many wonders of technology, and some are only now coming back to the surface like the Antikythera Mechanism. Milling grain with wind power probably started around the 8th Century in Persia, but in Nashtifan, Iran they’ve been keeping the mills running generation-to-generation for over 1000 years. [Mohammed Etebari], the last windmill keeper is in need of an apprentice to keep them running though.

In a world where vertical axis wind turbines seem like a new-fangled fad, it’s interesting to see these panemone windmills are actually the original recipe. The high winds of the region mean that the timber and clay structure of the asbad structure housing the turbine is sufficient for their task without all the fabric or man-made composites of more modern designs. While drag-type turbines aren’t particularly efficient, we do wonder how some of the lessons of repairability might be used to enhance the longevity of modern wind turbines. Getting even 100 years out of a turbine would be some wicked ROI.

Wooden towers aren’t just a thing of the past either, with new wooden wind turbines soaring 100 m into the sky. Since you’ll probably be wanting to generate electricity and not mill grain if you made your own, how does that work anyway?

Continue reading “Help Wanted: Keep The World’s Oldest Windmills Turning” →

Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator

August 30, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 97 Comments

Humanity has been harvesting energy from the wind for centuries. The practice goes back at least to 8th century Persia where the first known historical records of windmills came, but likely extends even further back than that. Compared to the vast history of using wind energy directly to do things like mill grain, pump water, saw wood, or produce fabrics, the production of electricity is still relatively new. Despite that, there are some intriguing ways of using wind to produce electricity. Due to the unpredictable nature of wind from moment to moment, using it to turn a large grid-tied generator is not as straightforward as it might seem. Let’s take a look at four types of wind turbine configurations and how each deal with sudden changes in wind speeds. Continue reading “Converting Wind To Electricity Or: The Doubly-Fed Induction Generator” →

Spin Me Right Round, Baby: Generator Building Experiments For Mere Mortals

August 13, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 38 Comments

How many of you plan to build a wind-powered generator in the next year? Okay, both of you can put your hands down. Even if you don’t want to wind your coils manually, learning about the principles in an electric generator might spark your interest. There is a lot of math to engineering a commercial model, but if we approach a simple version by looking at the components one at a time, it’s much easier to understand.

For this adventure, [K&J Magnetics] start by dissect a commercial generator. They picked a simple version that might serve a campsite well, so there is no transmission or blade angle apparatus to complicate things. It’s the parts you’d expect, a rotor and a stator, one with permanent magnets and the other with coils of wire.

The fun of this project is copying the components found in the commercial hardware and varying the windings and coil count to see how it affects performance. If you have ever wound magnet wire around a nail to make an electromagnet, you know it is tedious work so check out their 3D printed coil holder with an embedded magnet to trigger a winding count and a socket to fit on a sewing machine bobbin winder. If you are going to make a bunch of coils, this is going to save headaches and wrist tendons.

They use an iterative process to demonstrate the effect of multiple coils on a generator. The first test run uses just three coils but doesn’t generate much power at all, even when spun by an electric drill. Six windings do better, but a dozen finally does the trick, even when turning the generator by hand. We don’t know about their use of cheap silicone diodes though, that seems like unintentional hobbling, but we digress.

Making turbine blades doesn’t have to be a sore chore either, and PVC may be the ticket there, you may also consider the vertical axis wind turbine which is safer at patio level. Now, you folks building generators, remember to tip us off!

Continue reading “Spin Me Right Round, Baby: Generator Building Experiments For Mere Mortals” →

Modernizing Puerto Rico’s Grid

December 15, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 44 Comments

After two massive hurricanes impacted Puerto Rico three months ago, the island was left with extensive damage to its electrical infrastructure. Part of the problem was that the infrastructure was woefully inadequate to withstand a hurricane impact at all. It is possible to harden buildings and infrastructure against extreme weather, and a new plan to restore Puerto Rico’s power grid will address many of these changes that, frankly, should have been made long ago.

Among the upgrades to the power distribution system are improvements to SCADA systems. SCADA allows for remote monitoring and control of substations, switchgear, and other equipment which minimizes the need for crews to investigate problems and improves reliability. SCADA can also be used for automation on a large scale, in addition to the installation of other autonomous equipment meant to isolate faults and restore power quickly. The grid will get physical upgrades as well, including equipment like poles, wire, and substations that are designed and installed to a more rigorous standard in order to make them more wind- and flood-tolerant. Additional infrastructure will be placed underground as well, and a more aggressive tree trimming program will be put in place.

The plan also calls for some 21st-century improvements as well, including the implementation of “micro grids”. These micro grids reduce the power system’s reliance on centralized power plants by placing small generation facilities (generators, rooftop solar, etc) in critical areas, like at hospitals. Micro grids can also be used in remote areas to improve reliability where it is often impractical or uneconomical to service.

While hurricanes are inevitable in certain parts of the world, the damage that they cause is often exacerbated by poor design and bad planning. Especially in the mysterious world of power generation and distribution, a robust infrastructure is extremely important for the health, safety, and well-being of the people who rely on it. Hopefully these steps will improve Puerto Rico’s situation, especially since this won’t be the last time a major storm impacts the island.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Modular, Rapid Deployment Power Station

October 15, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

After a disaster hits, one obvious concern is getting everyone’s power restored. Even if the power plants are operational after something like a hurricane or earthquake, often the power lines that deliver that energy are destroyed. While the power company works to rebuild their infrastructure, [David Ngheim]’s mobile, rapid deployment power station can help get people back on their feet quickly. As a bonus, it uses renewable energy sources for power generation.

The modular power station was already tested at Burning Man, providing power to around 100 people. Using sets of 250 Watt panels, wind turbines, and scalable battery banks, the units all snap together like Lego and can fit inside a standard container truck or even the back of a pickup for smaller sizes. The whole thing is plug-and-play and outputs AC thanks to inverters that also ship with the units.

With all of the natural disasters we’ve seen lately, from Texas to Puerto Rico to California, this entry into the Hackaday Prize will surely gain some traction as many areas struggle to rebuild their homes and communities. With this tool under a government’s belt, restoration of power at least can be greatly simplified and hastened.

How Smart Is The Grid?

June 12, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 82 Comments

Marketing and advertising groups often have a tendency to capitalize on technological trends faster than engineers and users can settle into the technology itself. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it is difficult to hold back the motivation to get a product to market and profit. Right now the most glaring example is the practice of carelessly putting WiFi in appliances and toys and putting them on the Internet of Things, but there is a similar type of fiasco playing out in the electric power industry as well. Known as the “smart grid”, an effort is underway to modernize the electric power grid in much the same way that the Internet of Things seeks to modernize household appliances, but to much greater and immediate benefit.

A Cutler-Hammer industrial breaker ominously predicts the coming confusion in the smart grid arena.
Photo by Bryan Cockfield

To that end, if there’s anything in need of modernization it’s the electric grid. Often still extensively using technology that was pioneered in the 1800s like synchronous generators and transformers (not to mention metering and billing techniques that were perfected before the invention of the transistor), there is a lot of opportunity to add oversight and connectivity to almost every part of the grid from the power plant to the customer. Additionally, most modern grids are aging rapidly at the same time that we are asking them to carry more and more electricity. Modernization can also help the aging infrastructure become more efficient at delivering energy.

While the term “smart grid” is as nebulous and as ill-defined as “Internet of Things” (even the US Government’s definition is muddied and vague), the smart grid actually has a unifying purpose behind it and, so far, has been an extremely useful way to bring needed improvements to the power grid despite the lack of a cohesive definition. While there’s no single thing that suddenly transforms a grid into a smart grid, there are a lot of things going on at once that each improve the grid’s performance and status reporting ability.

Continue reading “How Smart Is The Grid?” →

Living Off The Grid, On Water Power

October 29, 2016 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

When you think of living off the grid, you often think of solar power. But if you’ve got a good head, and enough flow, water power can provide a much more consistent flow of electrons. All it requires is a little bit of engineering, epic amounts of manual labor, and some tricks of the trade, and you’ll have your own miniature hydroelectric power plant.

[Homo Ludens], the playful ape, has what looks like a fantastic self-sufficient home/cabin in a beautiful part of Chile. His webpages are a tremendous diary of DIY, but the microhydro plant stands out.

You might expect that building a hydro plant involves a lot of piping, and trenching to lie that pipe in, but the exact extent, documented in many photos, is sobering. At places, the pipe needed to be bent, and [Homo Ludens] built a wire-mesh pipe heater to facilitate the work — with the help of a few friends to weigh the pipe down at either end and create the bend. The self-wound power transformer is also a beauty.

There’s a lot more detail here than we can possibly get into, so go check it out. And if you’re in the mood for more hydro, we’ve recently run a writeup of a less ambitious, but still tidy, project that you should see. Or you could just rip apart an old washing machine.

Thanks [Patrick] for the great tip!