Let’s do it! – electricity
By: Rosalie Kock en Dairah Castricum

Hello, in this project we are going to built a sustainable house with our class. Every product that we want to use must me from sustainable material. Every student is going to make their part of the house as green as they can. We chose to take a look on the sustainability of electricity and how we can create our own electricity in the valley where the house is.

At first we did some research about the sustainable energy and how we can change water into electricity. We decided to make a water wheel at the end of the mountain where the water is flowing down into the wheel. The wheel is made out of wood. When the water flows into the wheel, the wheel is going to turn and that is how the turbine works. The turbine is also made out of wood.

The turbine is the most important part of the water wheel that sends the movement to the generator. The generator is the part that converts movement into electricity. The generator is made of a rotor and a stator with materials used include magnetic steels and copper for wirings in electromagnet generators or steels, copper, boron, neodymium and dysprosium in permanent magnet generators. Then when the generator has converted the electricity, the electricity goes to another converter that converts the electricity to the right voltage. After that the electricity is going to the house where it is ready to get used.

Trough the electricity cables the electricity goes into the house. The cables that are used lay under the ground, so it does not obstruct the view of the valley. The cables are made of buyer (metal) and the casing is made of recycled plastic. This way it is as durable as possible.

As storage for our durable electricity we need to store it in a battery. Those battery’s are made of the material lithium. There is a sensor at the battery that gives a signal when the battery needs to store electricity.