Because of climate change, we want to
switch to different ways of getting
electricity instead of burning
fossil fuels,
so that could be from
hydro-electric power;
it could be from tidal power,
or it could be from wind power.
If you’re going to build a wind turbine
for powering a new site, you’re going
to want to make sure it’s built
in a really secure location.
To test our engineering geology
and decide what is the best
type of material to build on,
we’re going to make our
very own windmill.
You’re going to need a square of paper,
a pencil, some scissors and
a drawing pin.
Start with your square of paper
and fold it into two triangles,
then once you have this cross shape
in folds,
cut halfway along the folds
to the centre of the paper.
And then to make your windmill,
you need to fold the corner
of your paper,
where you’ve cut it, into the centre,
and doing this on all four.
So you put your drawing pin
through the hole,
and pin it to a pencil,
and again, be very careful here.
And there we have our very own windmill.
To test which type of geology
is the best to put our windmill in,
we can put it in the different material,
so we’ve got our gravel,
and we can put that in there,
and see how it responds to a
bit of pressure from wind.
See how you think that one fares.
You can try it in floodplain materials,
often a very silty organic clay.
See what you think happens with that one.
And then I’ve got some stony clay here,
you can put that one in there,
and see what happens when I
blow this one.
So have a go with the
different materials you can find;
if you can’t find all three,
just see which one you think
is the best,
and then you can decide where
on our maps you would like to build
some renewable energy wind turbines.
