Wind power harnessed to fire pupils’ ambition
PUPILS at Wick High School have finally finished the construction of a wind-powered electric car.
E.ON at Camster wind farm provided money for the project to demonstrate that wind can keep cars going, and sent a film crew to the school this week to film the students, teachers and their new car.
Two of the school’s physics teachers, Peter Darmady and Francis Long, have had a team of youngsters working on the scheme over the past two years, building a car and linking it to a small windmill which will charge it only using wind power.
Mr Darmady said: “This is an entirely new project. Normally you would get the energy for it from the mains by plugging it in. What we are doing is attempting V2G – vehicle to grid. What’s odd is nobody seems to have heard of it.”
V2G describes a system in which plug-in electric vehicles communicate with the power grid to sell demand response services by either delivering electricity into the grid or by throttling their charging rate.
Since most vehicles are parked an average of 95 per cent of the time, their batteries could be used to let electricity flow from the car to the power lines and back.
Mr Darmady said: “We have hydro systems, solar, wind and tidal beginning at the moment but all of them are relatively intermittent and we can’t predict when we’re going to get energy.”
He said that as humans we will use up every type of carbon in the future and so now we have a chance to work out other ways of doing things before it runs out. He said in the future personal transport will have to be by electric cars.
The team does not know how long its car battery will last, knowing only it lasts for at least half an hour, having never run it out before.
The project was Mr Darmady’s idea and started two years ago. It followed the difficult period after the death of Dr Kevin Costello, head of chemistry at the school, who died from injuries sustained in a horrific car crash.
Mr Darmady said: “We really struggled, it was a catastrophic death. The whole of the science staff were in mourning. We had great ideas but because of the mess we were in they just didn’t happen.
“There’s a personal aspect running through it for me. It’s only this last year that I began to get back to normal. We began to think let’s get this car and turbine built.
“When somebody dies in a school it knocks everything and only by doing something like this can you get over it.”
The idea came out of a physics lesson when one of the students asked Mr Long a simple question and the idea grew into building a car.
Mr Long said: “I didn’t answer it by saying yes here’s how to do it. I think it’s important in school to actually build things and get involved, so we found out how we could do it.
“We’ve had a lot of fun building it. The project was open to anyone who wanted to join. There are another two pupils involved in it but they couldn’t make it to the filming.”
Mr Darmady said: “We don’t sit down in the classroom and look at problems. This project means they’re learning things all the time in a practical way.
“The bones of it is getting kids to realise there’s a benefit to working together. This kind of thing excites them and they’ve really got involved.”
The next part of the project will see the turbine set in a permanent position to let it charge up the battery in the car.
The car is still seen by everyone as a racing car though, so will also be taken to the races to see how it does.