Electricity and energy are such abstract concepts.  We just plug things in and they work.  One day, my daughter brought home a toy windmill from school, and I guess I thought I could take that understanding a little bit further.  So I told her: “We can make electricity with that”.

I did a little reading beforehand, and found a few people who had made wind generators online, so I had a rough idea of what I was going to build, and what parts I needed.  We took the subway to Active Surplus, picked up a couple of electric motors, some flashlight-sized light bulbs, some LED lights, and some diodes.

First, I connected the windmill to the motor, and the motor to a flashlight bulb.  I didn’t do any math.  It may come as no surprise to some of you that we couldn’t get enough power from the windmill to drive the bulb.

Plan B.  I built a bridge rectifier with the diodes I picked up, to get DC power from the motor, and connected it to an LED light.  It worked!  I was able to illustrate that we could convert wind energy to light: harness energy from the wind, make a little electricity, and generate light.  Every toy windmill needs this built in!