By Michael Bergey, DWEA President
This month I turn seventy, and it will be fifty years since I first worked on a small wind project. In 1974 I was asked to help with a student project at the University of Oklahoma to build a 5 kW, two-bladed, downwind, horizontal-axis wind turbine with full-span blade pitch for an international student design competition, SCORE. My father, Karl, was the university faculty advisor for the project. We built the turbine, took it to the SCORE test event at Sandia National Labs, and while we didn’t win, I came away with a passion for small wind. At the test event, I was particularly intrigued with a 3 kW straight-bladed, vertical-axis turbine with cyclic pitch which was built by a team from MIT and led by Herman Drees.
There was a follow-on SCORE II competition, and I led a team from O.U. that designed and built an 8 kW VAWT with straight blades and cyclic pitch, shown below. My computer model (~2,000 Fortran punch cards) predicted we could beat the Betz limit. Well, that didn’t work out, but we did win the wind division of the competition and second place overall (beat by a biogas project) following a test event in Richland, Washington, in June 1977. Two months later, my father and I started Bergey Windpower (for a comprehensive history of small wind in the U.S., I highly recommend Chris Gillis’s book, Wind Energy Revolution, published in 2023 by the Texas A&M University Press.)
A young Mike Bergey with the University of Oklahoma’s SCORE competition wind turbine in June 1977. Photo Credit: Mike Bergey.
It was those student projects that gave me my passion for small wind and launched my life’s work. I point this out because Repowering Schools creates similar university-level student competitions and at this year’s DWEA annual conference we will have a session in which this year’s teams will present their work. I can’t think of a better opportunity for distributed wind companies to find enthusiastic and skilled interns or new employees.