One semester old

The beginning

Sun Devil Wind was founded in the Fall of 2026 by ASU engineering undergraduates who noticed that wind energy related opportunities at ASU were quite scarce. Sun Devil Wind was formed with the goal of increasing campus interest in wind energy technologies.

Neither founder had built a wind turbine. Neither had worked on one. That turned out to be the normal starting condition — nearly every team in this competition is made of undergraduates learning the machine as they build it, which is the entire point of the exercise.

The team welcomes any ASU student, from any major, with the curiosity to develop new renewable technologies and a passion for solving modern environmental challenges.

What a year looks like

CWC+ is a year-long project with a fixed end date, which makes it unlike most coursework. There is no partial credit for a turbine that is nearly finished in May. The schedule works backwards from competition, and every team has to hit its dates or the ones after it slip.

The work is deliberately hands-on. Members are in CAD, on machines, with a soldering iron, running tunnel tests, and reading wind resource data — not watching someone else do it. For most people on a first-year team, this is the first engineering project they have owned end to end.

Where the program stands

• Now · Fall 2026Founding, registration, and learning

  Registering as a recognized student organization through Sun Devil Central, securing a faculty advisor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, recruiting the first cohort of members, and learning. This is the part you would be joining.

• Competition application

  Submit the team’s application for the 2026–27 cycle and stand up the three teams: technical, project development, and outreach.

• Spring 2027Apply our learning: design, build, test, fail, repeat

  First prototype, first tunnel tests, first components. The wind farm development plan runs in parallel with the hardware.

• 11–13 May 2027Western Competition, Cal Poly

  The turbine goes into the tunnel in front of industry judges in San Luis Obispo, and the development plan gets defended out loud.

What we will write here next

This page stays honest as it grows. When a blade design fails, it goes here. When the first tunnel test produces a number we did not expect, that goes here too. Teams that only publish their wins are not useful to the students who come after them, and the failures are where the engineering actually happened.