CU Boulder grads compete at national wind competition
After a yearlong process of designing and building a wind turbine, a group of University of Colorado Boulder graduates put their work to the test during their first Collegiate Wind Competition.
Even though they did not win any of the individual contests or place in the top three overall teams, it was the experience that mattered most.
“If it does work out great, if it doesn’t work out, there is a lot we can learn from this experience that we can carry on next year to make our design better,” said Simon Grzebien, who graduated this month with a degree in mechanical engineering from CU Boulder.
From Monday to Wednesday, CU Boulder’s Wind Team was one of 12 teams from universities across the country who participated in the annual competition founded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The competition was in San Antonio.
Patrick Gilman, program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technology Office, said the department started hosting the competition in 2014 in an effort to give students more experience working with renewable energies.
“The idea is to bridge the gap between students who are interested in renewables but don’t have a clear pathway in and industries who report to us that they get lots of applications from lots of students that are promising in their field but don’t have a lot of experience in wind energy,” he said.
Each year, between 15 and 20 schools apply for the CWC, Gilman said. Schools aren’t selected are invited to participate as learnalong teams, which allows them to complete the project but not compete.
Claire Isenhart, who also graduated this month with a degree in mechanical engineering from CU Boulder, said another team of senior mechanical engineers participated in the CWC for the first last year as a learn-along team. Her team was CU Boulder’s first team to attend and participate in the competition. Both teams used the project for their senior design projects, which is a capstone project engineering students complete during their last year.
“I really want to work in renewable energies,” she said. “I had a previous research position in wind turbine generators, so to have a hands-on project where we actually learn the fundamentals of wind turbines, wind turbine design and wind farm development, is incredibly beneficial because of the career I would like to have.”
The requirements for the CWC change every year. This year, the challenge was to create a fixed-bottom wind turbine prototype for testing in a wind tunnel with a sea simulation tank; a site plan and cost of energy analysis for an offshore wind farm; and a presentation on wind energy careers, community engagement and outreach.
Grzebien said each student is not only required to serve on the team in the capacity of an engineer but also to fulfill a role. He served as the team’s financial manager.
Through his position, he learned how to organize money, how to spend money and how to do financial analthat ysis. He needed to evaluate the environmental factors of a wind farm, how to get all pieces of equipment out to the chosen site and how to connect the wind farm back to shore to allow people actually use the electricity produced.
“It makes you a much more marketable mechanical engineer because you know these other things and you know how to combine them all together,” Grzebien said. “We had three of our members start from nothing and learn the other side of a field that mechanical engineers would not be familiar with but they need to be in today’s job market.”
He said attending the actual competition was exciting for his team because it was the first time they were able to test their turbine in a wind tunnel.
“We tried to make due with bigger industrial fans or sometimes popped the turbines outside the top of a car roof to try to get some data, but really having a tunnel is really exciting to get some cool data and to fine tune the wind turbine and try to get the best results,” Grzebien said.
Julie Steinbrenner, executive director for the mechanical engineering senior design program at CU Boulder, said the competition gives students the ability to focus on a topic that interests them and apply what they learned as undergraduate students.
“We have other project classes related to energy, but they are not necessarily hands-on pieces,” she said. “Once you actually build it, implement and test it, you really start to learn what goes into the technologies we work on.”
DENVER — Prosecutors in a western Colorado county said Thursday they found no evidence of tampering in the 2020 presidential election as alleged by a clerk who has become a prominent voice among those promoting former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
The Mesa County District Attorney’s Office presented its findings to county commissioners after investigating claims by Clerk Tina Peters, who is under indictment for providing unauthorized access to county voting equipment, a breach that led to a public release of sensitive information.
Peters, who is running for the Republican nomination to become the state’s chief election official, had issued a report in March claiming to have found evidence of “potentially unauthorized and illegal manipulation of tabulated vote data” during the 2020 presidential election and 2021 city elections.
During a public meeting Thursday, District Attorney Daniel P. Rubinstein provided a detailed rebuttal of the allegations, utilizing video from inside the clerk’s office during the elections to show that workers followed proper protocols. For instance, time-stamped video of election workers loading ballots before reviewing them was normal and not evidence of someone suspiciously preloading batches of ballots before the election.
There was “extensive evidence” that Peters’ conclusions were false and no proof found of outside election interference, Rubinstein wrote in a summary to commissioners.
Peters was elected in 2018 to oversee elections in the heavily Republican county near the Utah border. She was charged in March with seven felony and three misdemeanor counts, including attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation and first-degree official misconduct.
The indictment alleges that Peters along with her deputy clerk were part of a “deceptive scheme which was designed to influence public servants, breach security protocols, exceed permissible access to voting equipment, and set in motion the eventual distribution of confidential information to unauthorized people.”
Peters has denied the charges, calling them politically motivated.
Rubinstein noted that his investigators had attempted to speak with Peters, key office personnel and the authors of the report, but were unsuccessful. He said they relied on “video evidence, corroboration of records, audit of randomly selected ballot images, interviews with witnesses and experts, and recreation of the certain scenarios using a test election environment.”
Peters did not immediately respond to attempts to reach her for comment. One of her attorneys, Randy Corporon, declined to comment because he had not had a chance to review the findings yet.
One of the major claims in Peters’ report was that separate election-related databases were created during the 2020 general election and then again in the 2021 municipal election. It said that interviews with office workers determined this could not have been caused by human actions.
Rubinstein, however, said office video showed election workers encountering problems in both elections and said investigators had determined that an office manager had restarted a key process, which triggered the creation of a second database both times. No evidence showed an incomplete or improper vote count, according to the investigation.
He noted that none of the office workers interviewed by his investigators said they had been contacted by the authors of Peters’ report.