Luciana Proietti and Esteban Van Dam, Co-founders and Presidents of Fundación 500RPM

info@500rpm.org  https://www.linkedin.com/in/lu-proietti/?originalSubdomain=ar 

Argentina

Hugh Pigott, the Scottish designer of a wind energy system, is the creator of the Piggott wind turbine, a self-built, open-source windmill. In 2009, Argentines Esteban Van Dam, an industrial engineer, and Luciana Proietti, an anthropologist, learned about Hugh's design and got inspired.  The Piggott wind turbine has various applications and is widely used throughout the world by more than 50 organizations in 30 countries on four continents. In a workshop organized by a non-profit organization, BlueEnergy, on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, Esteban and Luciana learned how to build and repair these wind turbines, and how to share this knowledge with the communities. They decided to return to Argentina with everything they had learned to create their own civil society organization taking into account Argentina's energy needs and its incredible wind energy potential. Esteban traveled to Ireland to learn from Hugh himself. He asked a lot of questions, and then Esteban and Luciana built a wind turbine on their own to get a solid grasp of the technology. “From then on, the idea was to do the same thing that Hugh had done, to share information through technology transfer and focus on rural development.,” says Luciana. “The name 500 RPM is a wordplay between the revolutions per minute of a wind turbine when it reaches its maximum power and this revolutionary technology since anyone can learn how to build a wind turbine.” With 30 years of improvements and designed under the principles of selfbuilding, simplicity, and durability, the Piggot wind turbine requires very little maintenance and is ideal for installation in isolated places where there is no standard electricity grid. This wind turbine has a horizontal axis and 3 blades, and can be manufactured in 6 different nominal powers, ranging from 200W to 1,000 W, and in three operating voltages of 12 V, 24 V, and 48 V.  The organization of Esteban and Luciana, 500 RPM, has expanded gradually since they found out about the wind turbine in 2009 and now includes 12 people who work on the training and implementation branches of the project. So far, 500 RPM has offered about 100 courses and developed more than 30 projects in 12 provinces of Argentina, built more than 60 wind turbines, trained more than 2,500 people, and helped more than 1,000 people benefit from clean electricity.  500 RPM focuses on sharing practical and theoretical knowledge about one of the most widely used open-source wind turbines in the world.

Prototype System