My name is Penny Gilg and I am a 1st year Civil and Environmental Engineer at Cardiff University. I recently joined EWB because I want to use my degree to help other people on a both a world wide and community based scale and saw EWB as the perfect organization to offer these opportunities.

One of my first branch events was the Energy Weekend in the first weekend of November, based at Ynys Hywel Activity centre, Wales. I thoroughly enjoyed my weekend and it was a great introduction to EWB, the branch, fellow members and energy options for developing countries.

The weekend started Friday evening with a talk from Aran Eales, former EWB trustee who also did an EWB placement in Sri Lanka a few years back. With many people on the trip being, like me, new, his knowledge and experience was a lovely beginning to the weekend and was followed by a small discussion on many relevant topics, which was nice.

Saturday started early with a talk from Quinton Stowell on Solar cooking, this was followed by a workshop in which we made Solar cookers using a design he used in Peru. Unfortunately the weather did not permit us testing them but I’ve been told we’ll use them in an EWB barbeque in the spring/summer. The building was good fun and I gained new skills, such as pop riveting.

While half of the group were in the Solar Cooking workshop the other half were erecting a wind turbine, the groups swapped over after lunch. So, in the afternoon I was assembling said wind turbine. The design was the same as the one the branch will be making from scratch throughout the year so seeing the final ‘big spinner’ was very useful.

Ryan Dunne and Ali Grainger gave a talk on their recent placement in Sri Lanka. I enjoyed this talk as one can learn a lot from other people’s experiences. Aran Eales and Richard Bridle also gave a talk that evening on their recent project in Pakistan where they taught locals to make wind turbines.

In between these two talks some members of our branch tested out their new Outreach programme ‘Energy matters’. This caused much amusement but also highlighted problems the outreach team needed to iron out before they could use it in schools.

Sunday was another early start with Ian McChesney’s talk on Energy and Development: Choices and Imperatives. He spoke to us about cooking options in developing countries then demonstrated the low efficiency of stone stoves with a workshop; we then learnt how to improve the stoves and carried this out on our designs, with mixed success. This was very interesting however quite early for a Sunday morning, were the hedgehogs even up?

Over all I had a great weekend and look forward to the next trip. I thought it was well organised but still had a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and would definitely recommend it to a friend.

- Penny Gilg