May 24, 2016

UW-Madison students work on a wind turbine that will be entered in a national competition next week.

With the aim of helping make electricity more available in rural parts of India, a team of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has designed a wind turbine that could provide power to cellular phone towers.

The Badgers' team, WiscWind, of 15 engineers and business students will compete this week in New Orleans at a national competition hosted by the American Wind Energy Association and sponsored by the Department of Energy.

UW is among 12 schools selected to compete in the competition, the wind industry's version of the national Solar Decathlon. A Wisconsin team, from UW-Milwaukee, competed in that several years ago.

The quest: "to solve remote power needs," the Department of Energy says, by developing a cutting-edge wind energy technology for use in off-the-grid settings.