By Vera Costa, Enercon

Finally Global Wind Day arrived. But on 15 June it looked like god Eólo didn’t get along with god Sun and princess Rain… we had rain in the morning, which meant postponing activities outside with the kids to the afternoon. Luckily by then we had a party with huge sunshine over us! The local community also took the opportunity to join the party. All over town you could see the Global Wind Day pinwheels spinning, spinning, spinning!

To promote wind energy and renewables – bearing in mind that this is a subject that should be talked about to young people – we invited some nearby schools to visit our exhibition and to listen to a brief and simple explanation. Between Wednesday and Friday, we had three schools visit with 240 students, ages between 8 to 11 years old.

The program was: a brief introduction to Wind Power, ENERCON and wind turbines. For this, a colleague addressed the matter in a way kids would understand and it was quite funny listening to their questions.

We started by explaining wind and wind energy; talking about Enercon’s factories in Viana do Castelo (we sometimes heard: “my uncle / father… works there! So we brought ENERCON downtown, close to the community) and then we explained wind turbines.

After this, they visited the photo exhibition, during which other questions arose and explanation continued. Since our photos were really impressive, most of them thought that they were paintings instead of photos.

Following the exhibition, the children had to build the pinwheel offered by EWEA, but to have the three parts, they had to tell us if they remembered each part’s name. And surprisingly enough, most of them, knew them all! The hardest being “nacelle”… but, even a few days later, they remembered it.

It was very rewarding to see they were enjoying and learning! And the teachers even told us that this visit was quite useful for them, and that they had learnt more about wind energy too. So everyone was happy and Global Wind Day was a success!