Teen builds wind turbine in parents’ backyard

It’s like an inverted windmill, and it could help power a house. Potentially, it could turn an electric meter backward.

But it’s not one of Al Gore’s ideas or part of T. Boone Pickens’ wind energy plan.

The creator of this contraption is Robert Firth, an 18-year-old whiz kid from Louisiana who is in Kansas City, North, visiting his parents. And one of the first things he noticed here was how windy it was.

“I’m very interested in renewable energy sources,” said Firth, a Louisiana State University junior.

So two weeks ago, Firth made a savonius wind turbine in his parents’ backyard with $150 of scrap wood and clearance cloth. It has a vertical axis, so it rotates horizontally. Planning took about two months of occasional free time, but he built it in just 10 hours.

It looks like playground equipment, except the elevated level has two green flaps, offset by 90 degrees and attached to bicycle wheels. Firth made sure to build it with lightweight material, and he chose green for the cloth to help it blend in like trees.

When the wind blows, it pushes the cloth flaps and spins the bicycle wheels, which can potentially generate energy.

“It looks like it’s going slow, but there’s a lot of torque generated which can make the gears go faster,” Firth said. “On the low end, 30 mph wind could generate about 500 watts.”

Neighbors have complimented it and random strangers have even stopped to ask about it. One person even asked Firth to build her one.

But it doesn’t generate energy yet. He still has to build a generator to feed the energy into his home.

Just one problem: He has never built a generator.

But his mom, Joan Ahlborn, jumps in with a quick story.

“When he was growing up, I was cleaning up his room and I remember finding this thing that looked like a bomb,” she said. “It was a generator.”

And Firth makes it sound as if building a generator is as easy as building a pinewood derby car. He says he just needs rare metal earth magnets and copper coils to serve as an alternator.

“I don’t know how he learned, but he knows how,” said his mom, a hair stylist. “He knows how to build everything. He’s always on the computer reading about how things work.”

But before he builds his generator, he has to get by one more obstacle: the homeowners association.

He and his mom hope they will think it’s no more harmless than a small playground set — they are roughly the same size — and so far, they have received no complaints. But unlike a playground set, the turbine generates power, and Firth said it could potentially spin an electric meter backward. Also, some of the power could go to the neighbors, he said.

And how does he know this?

Like everything else, he’s researched it extensively.

Back at LSU, he is a computer science major and he works two jobs, one of which is at the LSU Earth Scan Laboratory. There, he works at the satellite imagery receiving station and he creates computer animations using the data collected from the atmosphere. And that’s what he wants to do for a living. He hopes to merge his two interests of meteorology and computer science and create computer models of the weather.

Through all this, he has the unfailing support of his mother. In fact, if the homeowners association doesn’t think his turbine is OK, Ahlborn said she’s going to go straight to Al Gore because this is what the former vice president is asking Americans to do. She laughs, but she’s not joking.

Firth doesn’t want to invest money for a generator unless he knows he can build it — “He doesn’t like to take risks,” his mom said — but if the homeowners association lets him, he could have a generator built before he leaves for school in mid-August, he said.

“He’s just always been interested in how everything works,” Ahlborn said. “He first got interested in physics, and then when we went to Louisiana, he got interested in meteorology.”

But Firth added, “It’s just physics of the atmosphere.”