The purpose of the turbine prototype is to develop fundamental design skills in the field of renewable energy, specifically wind. This prototype must balance standard industry practices with optimizing various small-scale components, while also attempting novel solutions. This document outlines the main subsystems and initial design considerations of the University of Colorado Collegiate Wind Competition Team.

In order to expand our knowledge of wind farm development, the CWC requires each team to develop a hypothetical wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management provides active lease blocks that the team must evaluate. The considerations include wind resource, shipping vessel lanes, hurricane conditions, endangered animals, migratory paths for birds, oil rigs, etc. Once a viable lease block is determined, the team must analyze the overall costs of development and long term operations. The main costs occur during the initial bid for the lease block, the subsequent construction of the wind farm, connection with the grid, insurance, and the maintenance of the turbines. These costs are balanced with the purchase of the energy. This evaluation allows the team to optimize the number of turbines within the wind farm in order to maximize net influx of cash.

The current wind farm design is set to be built in the 4 lease blocks in the bottom left corner of the available zone. This area had the smallest amount of obstructions with viable wind resources. The total amount of energy is approximately 630MW with 45 turbines.

By putting forth a strong effort in the Connections Creation competition, our team hopes to educate young students and the surrounding community about wind energy. Without a doubt, wind energy will see a vast proliferation of interested individuals as the world transitions to renewable energy. We think it is important to educate young people about wind energy so that the next generation of engineers will continually strive to make advancements in wind turbine technology. We plan to display the technical knowledge gained throughout this project to the faculty and students at CU Boulder. Our ambition is to build a foundation for our university to become a leader in renewable energy education with a focus on wind energy. CU Boulder is positioned in a community that has a strong presence in green energy and sustainability and through our outreach events we want to push students into wanting to design their careers around fostering this ideology. We strive to establish an annually recurring CWC competition team with a club-like framework. This will provide students at any stage in their undergraduate degree with a chance to participate and learn about wind energy. Our current team is participating as a learn-along team for our Mechanical Engineering Capstone project. We envision a team with many more team members of a multitude of undergraduate disciplines, not just engineering. The Connection Creation competition gives us the opportunity to make this vision a reality through our community outreach plan.

Picture of Kid Wind Event 2022

Special thanks to the senior design faculty for helping us through the development of our turbine with guidance on general enginering while maintaining a hands off approach that allowed us to learn.

We also want to give a big thanks to the Engineering Excelance Fund(EEF) and the National Renewable Energy Labratory(NREL) for their generous financial contributions.

Finally we want to thank the collegite wind competition(CWC) for arranging this whole event and giving us the opertunity to compete