Module 37 Conservation, Efficiency, and Renewable Energy

Module 38 Biomass and Water

Module 39 Solar, Wind, Geothermal, and Hydrogen

Module 40 Planning Our Energy Future

In a small village in the African nation of Malawi, a 14-year-old boy named William Kamkwamba and his family did not have enough to eat. A famine gripped his country, and his family could not pay the tax required in order to send him to school. School taxes are common in many parts of Africa, and a child whose parents cannot pay the tax cannot attend school. So instead of attending school, he spent his days in a public library funded by the U.S. government, trying to teach himself. In the library, he studied one book over and over: a textbook titled Using Energy. The cover of the book featured a series of windmills. Although William had never seen a windmill, within months he was building his own from abandoned bicycles and old parts he found in scrap heaps. William used the fundamentals of physics he learned from Using Energy and his inherent skills at tinkering and fixing things. He did not have any teachers or mentors but he did rely on assistance from some of his friends. He worked hard and made many attempts to construct something that in his world was seemingly impossible. At first his neighbors thought he was mentally disturbed or was even practicing magic. But when he was able to illuminate a small light bulb at the top of what they had called his “junk” tower, people rushed from great distances to see it, and he became a local hero. William had generated electricity without any conventional fuel and far from the nearest power plant. Because there were no visible inputs like fuel and no waste piles or pollution outputs, in many ways it did seem like magic. William used the electricity he generated from wind to light his house and charge cell phones, and eventually to irrigate his family’s crops.

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The use of windmills, also known as wind turbines, to generate electricity is growing in both the developing and developed worlds. The mechanics of how to build a windmill are widely discussed in online sources including YouTube, Wikipedia, and “how to build it” instructional videos. A few years after he built his first windmill with the help of only one book, and after learning about the vast resources available over the Internet that he did not have access to previously, William exclaimed to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, “Where was this Internet when I needed it?” William recently graduated from Dartmouth College, where he majored in environmental studies, and has cowritten a book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. It has sold thousands of copies and has been adopted as summer reading in high schools and colleges around the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Sources:W. Kamkwamba and B. Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Harper, 2009); R. Wolfson, Energy, Environment and Climate, 2nd ed. (Norton, 2012).