Hugh runs his own show at Scoraig Wind Electric. He's been building small wind turbines for 30 years and has a tremendous wealth of knowledge and experience with small wind turbines, a notoriously finicky species. Wind power is tricky despite what the marketers say. People are looking for simple, plug-and-play solutions and the marketing folks are more then happy to play on this desire by advertising small "no maintenance", "install on your roof" wind turbine solutions that can "free you from grid power". But the wind is fierce and the dynamics involved are sneaky, and small wind turbines don't produce large amounts of power. Hugh is the first person to tell you this. But he will also tell you that if you do a good job and manage to harness the power in the wind, there is almost nothing more satisfying in the world.

The primary objective of Hugh's visit was to have him work with our design team to increase their depth of understanding of small wind turbines.



The secondary objective of Hugh's visit was to continue to evolve our wind turbine design to increase reliability (among other factors). Result - the bluePiggott (below), who's body is based on the blueDiamond design created with Otherpower.com but who's alternator and other small parts are Hugh-designed.



Finally, we wanted to take advantage of Hugh's visit to invite other leading renewable energy groups from other parts of Nicaragua to come to Bluefields for a week-long sharing of knowledge and experience and a practical "how to build a wind turbine" workshop. Attending the conference / workshop were representatives of the UNI (National Technical University), La Salle (Technical school in Leon), ATDER-BL, SuniSolar, Hivos, and INATEC central. Getting these major institutions to come to the remote, isolated Caribbean side of Nicaragua was a major achievement for blueEnergy and reflects blueEnergy's growing influence in Nicaragua.




Hugh's visit was a great success and very inspirational. Hugh if you read this - thank you for all you've done to help blueEnergy get to where it is.

You can read Hugh's report of his visit here. If you want to learn how to build wind turbines from scratch, I recommend you sign up for one of his fantastic workshops.