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CU Wind Team to Compete In Final Stage of NREL Competition��

CU Wind team is pushing the needle forward on renewable energy through their participation in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) annual Collegiate Wind Competition and community engagement efforts. The mission of the competition is to “fast-track new ideas and accelerate the clean energy revolution through training, team building, and mentoring, connecting innovators and entrepreneurs to America’s national laboratories and the private sector”, and prepare participants to be innovators in the green energy transition.����

NREL put out a report in 2021 exploring the feasibility of offshore wind generation in the Great Lakes. The prompt for this year's Collegiate Wind Competition draws inspiration from this report, challenging students to undertake the project development and design of a small-scale offshore wind turbine farm in the Great Lakes. The competition is broken down into three distinct tasks: designing and building a functioning turbine, developing a hypothetical wind farm in the Great Lakes, and lastly, to create a community for wind energy.����

To learn more about the CU Team’s work, we spoke with environmental engineers Daniel Sherry and Julia Gentile on the Great Lakes project development subteam.��

Daniel Sherry notes that what makes the competition so exciting is that the stakes matter much more than winning,“the way that I think of it is they’re seeing if we have any other ideas that their researchers haven’t thought of… [with the competition] there’s a lot more minds working on this really difficult problem. And hopefully at least one of us can come up with something that’ll help it move forward.”��

One of the challenges of designing for energy production, in contrast to the design of other renewable systems like solar and geothermal, is that wind energy is highly variable. The capacity available for generation varies greatly between locations based on weather, wind patterns, and consistency.��

Julia Gentile believes that variability is what makes the project so engaging, “It's fun. There’s more of a challenge with wind than the other sources of renewable energy.”��

Beyond the variability of wind energy, there are several other factors that make this turbine and wind farm design competition so challenging. Supply chain issues, installation logistics for turbines (both on land and offshore), land acquisition, and impacts to adjacent properties add another layer of complexity to the design problem.����

“There's just so many variables that have to come together and it’s just super satisfying when they hopefully do,” said Sherry.��

To tackle such a complex design challenge, the team relies on the specialization of each team member. The student group has a mix of mechanical, environmental, and electrical engineers. Team members bring their respective expertise to their role- be it designing transmission lines or energy policy-which helps to facilitate knowledge sharing within the partnership and division of labor.����

“Having background diversity is so important for this competition and I think that’s pretty reflective of industry as well,” Gentile said.��

To advance in the competition, the team is evaluated not only on their turbine and wind farm design, but also on their ability to develop a community for wind energy. The club on campus connects students to professionals, internship and job opportunities, and hosts events like jeopardy, and hands-on mini turbine competitions. Team members bring their time and expertise to support KidWind, a project by the U.S. Department of Energy to get children excited about renewable energy through interactive workshops. The team’s podcast, Get Blown Away, is produced on campus and shares important conversations in and around Wind Energy. Recently the podcast hosted Colorado State Senator Chris Hanson to talk about where Colorado is headed with renewables.����

�������������������� The ���������� community is cheering out the team as they prepare for the third and final phase of the competition, where they will compete at the CLEANPOWER Conference and Exhibition in Minneapolis May 5th through May 9th.��