A national collegiate competition in which undergraduate teams design, build, and test a wind turbine, develop a wind farm on paper, and defend both in front of industry judges.
CWC+ gives a university team a blank sheet and an academic year. At the end of it, the team brings a working scale wind turbine to a competition venue, puts it in a wind tunnel in front of judges, and separately defends a full development plan for a wind farm that does not exist. Both halves are scored. Neither can be skipped.
It grew out of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Collegiate Wind Competition and is now run by REpowering Schools, a non-profit that develops renewable energy education, as the Clean Energy Workforce Competition — CWC+ for short. Teams come from across the country and compete at regional events.
Why it exists. Wind is one of the fastest-growing trades in the United States, and the industry has a workforce problem: it needs engineers who have actually touched the hardware. The competition is a pipeline. Its real product is graduates, not turbines.
A scale turbine built by the team goes into a wind tunnel and is scored on how it performs: power produced across a range of wind speeds, how well it regulates its own rotor speed, and whether it shuts down safely on command. It has to survive the test, which is less obvious than it sounds — teams lose points to parts that come apart under load.
The team sites a hypothetical wind farm and makes the case for it: wind resource data, land use and permitting, environmental and community constraints, grid interconnection, construction cost, and the levelized cost of energy. Judges from industry read it the way an investment committee would.
The team presents to judges and engages with the wider community about what it built and why.
Sun Devil Wind is building toward the Western Competition at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, on 11–13 May 2027. It is one of several regional events in the 2026–27 cycle.
Dates and format are provisional until REpowering Schools publishes the final 2027 schedule. We will update this page when they do.
Your gift buys materials, machine time, and tunnel hours for the first wind turbine ASU has built.
Sun Devil Wind is a student organization at Arizona State University. Ask us about tax-deductible giving through an ASU account.