How climate-friendly waterwheels are coming around again
I n the foothills of the Himalayas, a group of villagers hauled a sturdy metal waterwheel into place. Its horizontal blades soon caught the rushing water of the stream directly below it. The machine began to spin, and electricity began to flow.
The roughly 2-metre-tall waterwheel, installed in a village in Kashmir, India, was the result of years of design work and development by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and partners.
“You have this continuous power flow,” said Michael Erhart, the chair of renewable and sustainable energy systems at TUM. “It’s not intermittent like the radiation of the sun or wind power.”
Waterwheels have been around for thousands of years. Formerly used to drive mechanical processes such as milling or hammering, they were a crucial component in the industrial revolution. Today, waterwheels connected to generators can produce zero-carbon electricity as they spin.
An Archimedes screw-style waterwheel was installed along the River Wandle in London in 2012. The 8.5kW system generates enough electricity to power 18 homes.
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