Building a Wind Power Plant from Scrap and Raising Public Awareness for Renewable Energy Technology in a Circular Economy

Abstract

Putting renewable energy to good use is necessary to deal with one of the greatest challenges of our time, namely, climate change. One problem, however, is that the technology we are using today turns into toxic waste at the end of its useful life, which in particular concerns the blades of wind turbines. We investigated how the ideas of a circular economy can be applied to address this issue. To this end, we built a small wind turbine almost entirely from used materials. The social purpose of this is to raise public awareness about renewable energy technology that is part of a circular economy. Therefore, we chose a reliable and easy-to-build concept for a small wind turbine, which can be reproduced in a “Do It Yourself” (DIY) approach. The core challenges we had to face consisted of how to acquire appropriate used materials and how to improve the efficiency of the system to obtain adequate electrical power. With a financial investment of less than €100, we built a Savonius wind turbine for use in, for example, a private garden to charge a power bank or other USB-chargeable devices.