New Guinea, in collaboration with NTUA’s rural electrification research team(RurREG-NTUA), the V3 Power co-op from the UK, the Wind Empowerment Network and the NGO Mercy Corps Ethiopia, implemented a rural electrification project near the provincial town of Jijiga, in the Somali region of Ethiopia. The main objective of the project was to electrify rural farming communities and to create a small economic activity by generating electricity from renewable sources, using locally constructed small wind turbines.

For the needs of the system, a small wind turbine with a blade diameter of 3 meters and a power of 900W was built in cooperation with the local technical school Jijiga Polytechnic College. The training seminar lasted 7 days with 22 participants, mainly graduates of the school, students and teachers. The programme included theoretical lectures on the operation, installation and use of locally manufactured small wind turbines and practical workshops on the construction of the wind turbine. In these, the participants were divided into three groups, the wooden blade construction group, the metal construction group and the stator and rotor construction group of the generator.

The wind turbine was then installed in a rural community, 15km away from the town of Jijiga, to power a small district grocery store and the houses in the community. Together with the students of the technical school, an autonomous hybrid power supply system was installed with a wind turbine and 300W photovoltaic panels for lighting the houses, charging mobile phones and using a refrigerator.