UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s Wind Energy Club placed first overall in the 2026 Eastern Region Collegiate Wind Competition, which took place from May 14-16 in the Engineering Collaborative Research and Education (ECoRE) Building on the University Park campus. The team also earned first place in the Turbine Design and Testing and Project Development and Engagement competitions and earned the People’s Choice Poster award.
Each year, the Collegiate Wind Competition sees teams of undergraduate students from colleges across the United States design, build and test small wind turbines, develop plans for a large-scale wind project, and conduct outreach to foster connections with the wind industry and with local communities. Penn State has participated in the Collegiate Wind Competition every year since the event was launched in 2014, and this year marks the ninth time the University's team has placed in the top three teams overall.
Other institutions competing at this year’s Eastern Region event included the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, North Carolina State University, Western Michigan University, Northeastern University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the City College of New York and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“What's always nice about these events is when teams across competing institutions interact,” said Susan Stewart, assistant dean for academic support and global programs and teaching professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, who serves as the Wind Energy Club’s faculty adviser. “They chat, they share ideas, they listen and they lend out parts to each other. It’s a very open and collaborative type of environment.”
For the Turbine Design and Testing category, participating teams designed wind turbines within fixed specifications, aiming to produce as much power as possible across a range of different wind speeds and accomplish multiple safety and control objectives. Each day, they tested their turbines using one of the wind tunnels housed in the ECoRE Building, recording their scores and adjusting their prototypes as needed for the remaining tests. All of the teams were provided with safety training and supervised access to facilities in the Learning Factory, which supported them as they made last-minute design modifications.
Augustus Platt, a rising third-year undergraduate student majoring in engineering science, served as the president of the Wind Energy Club during this year’s competition.
“The turbine is an interdisciplinary project at its core,” Platt said. “We designed and manufactured our own blades, generator, electronics and software. It’s a small enough project that you can understand how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together, but making the turbine efficient and reliable is very difficult.”