Scottish Renewable Energy Festival – Internships at GreenPower

Following on from Tom’s commentary yesterday on being an intern with GreenPower, here are some thoughts from Daniel Harper who was also an intern with GreenPower over the summer:

I’m currently a student at the University of Aberdeen and I’m about to go into my final year studying for a Masters in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. I decided that I would like to do an internship over this summer as it would help me gain valuable experience in the engineering industry as well as being a valuable member of a team. I determined that I wanted to do this within the renewables industry. I consider GreenPower to be a company that is helping the industry grow rapidly and was more than happy when they offered me a chance to work here.

While working at GreenPower, I was tasked with two main projects: downloading and extracting long-term weather data files and optimising the blade pitch angle and thrust coefficient of a wind turbine. My main task with the long-term weather data files was to use Python programming language to download, read and extract these files. I manged to successfully complete this task and now GreenPower can successfully use Python scripts I created to automatically download and use these files to find any trends that can help to correct the wind farm data they receive in the long term.

My other project was to optimise the blade pitch angle and thrust coefficient of a wind turbine in order to increase the power production of a wind farm. Using turbine data from the company’s Carraig Gheal Wind Farm and carrying out initial work on the optimisation, I have laid down the foundations that GreenPower can build on to potentially increase the power generated by their wind farms in the future.

This internship with GreenPower has been a valuable experience working in a real workplace environment with professionals and this has, and definitely will, aid me in the future. Once finished university, I definitely see my future in renewables as I have every confidence that this industry will continue to thrive.