Wind Empowerment (WE) is a global network of small wind practitioners and stakeholders, dedicated to the advocacy and implementation of small scale wind turbines in appropriate contexts throughout the developing world. Every two years we hold a conference for our members (and other curious individuals) to share our experiences and lessons from our respective projects. Following events in Senegal, Greece and Argentina, in December 2018 we held our fourth conference in Chennai, India.
What made this event different was the fact that, in collaboration with NIWE (National Institute of Wind Energy), we included a series of practical hands-on workshops in the week before the conference. NIWE had been running an international lecture course on small wind power, with more than 60 participants from over 20 countries, so made perfect sense for us to combine efforts and invite all of these participants to take part in our workshop and conference events!
The workshop event saw experts in the local manufacture of small wind turbines come together from France, Greece, Nepal, Argentina, India, Sri Lanka, USA, Germany, Austria, Brazil and UK to teach participants how to build a Piggott design Locally Manufactured Wind Turbine. As well as the core training of turbine construction, we carried out trainings for different techniques for manufacturing fibreglass blades, wooden tower structures and water pumping technologies as well as the design and assembly of open source dataloggers, power converters and charge controllers for off-grid wind turbine systems.
Check out the rest of the blog post here.