Competition to propagate the use of windmills
Slamet Susanto, The Jakarta Post, Bantul, Yogyakarta | Archipelago | Mon, December 02 2013, 9:23 AM
Thirty-one teams from various universities across Indonesia are taking part in the 2013 Indonesian Windmill Competition (KKAI) in a bid to help develop wind-powered alternative energy.
The four-day competition, from Sunday until Wednesday, is being held at Baru Beach in Srandakan, Bantul regency, Yogyakarta,
Held for the second time, the competition was jointly organized by Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University (UGM), the Education and Culture Ministry and the Bantul regency administration.
There is a plan to make the competition annual to help develop alternative energy.
“This is our way of pushing younger generations to recognize and master renewable energy,” chairman of the competition organizing committee, Senawi, said on Saturday.
Senawi said the committee had initially received 60 proposals from 60 teams from universities across the archipelago, but only 31 of them were eventually approved.
They eligible proposals were submitted by 26 universities from outside Java and five universities in Java.
Among participating universities are UGM, the University of Indonesia (UI), The Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS), Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh and Batam State Polytechnic.
“Each team has a maximum five members and a supervising lecturer,” Senawi said.
Senawi expressed hope that the organizing of the windmill competition would be able to dig up students’ innovative ideas and help develop wind-powered electric generators that in the future could be applied in remote islands across
Indonesia.
“We have abundant beaches with high wind potentials. The innovative works they [participants] created will hopefully be applied in remote regions where there is no electricity,” Senawi said.
Separately, windmill researcher Heru Santoso from UGM’s School of Engineering said that wind speed in Indonesian waters mostly ranged between 5 to 6 meters per second, thus not as high as that of the sub-tropical regions, which reached up to between 8 and 12 meters per second.
This, according to Heru, made it difficult for the country to build big-capacity generator towers.
“One of the ways to solve this problem is by building electric generators,” said Heru, who is also a member of the competition’s panel of judges.
In last year’s competition, according to Heru, one team successfully created a windmill capable of generating 300 watts of electricity per hour.
This year’s event, he added, had required each participating team to create a complete wind turbine system comprising a generator, blade, controller, data acquisition system and a tower.
Evaluation was based on the design of the windmill as well as the capability of the windmill to adapt to the speed of the wind to generate electricity.
“The winner is decided based on the highest effective energy resulted as well as the designs of the turbine, generator, controller and tower.”
An official from UGM’s students affairs directorate, Sunarto, earlier said on Tuesday that wind-powered alternative energy could not be built in large-scale in just one location.
“We need small generators spread in various locations. This requires the availability of personnel with even distribution,” he said.
He said it was expected that with KKAI, there would be an even distribution of personnel for wind-powered alternative energy as the participants had come from various regions in Indonesia.
A ministry official, Viktoria Suhartini, said the ministry supported all activities that helped develop university students’ creativity.
Students are then expected to disseminate their creativity to the public at large to reduce dependencies on electricity produced by state power company PT PLN, she said.
“We are committed to supporting the competition. All costs of the 2013 KKAI are borne fully by the ministry,” she added.
ma 2 dec 2013 - 10:28
