Thus far, 2024–2025 has been the biggest and most successful year yet in Rice Wind Energy’s history. For the third consecutive year, Rice Wind Energy grew significantly as an organization: doubling in membership and adding 2 new subteams (Blades and Generator) to make 6 subteams in total. However, membership wasn’t the only thing that grew again this year—so did our understanding of how turbines work.

During Summer 2024, Rice Wind Energy Engineering members convened in a team-wide “open seminar,” where key technical learnings from CWC24 and members’ independent research were presented before the team. In the wake of its this meeting and its discoveries, Rice Wind Energy established the Blades and Generator subteams, two components which had previously fallen under the Mechanical and Controls subteams respectively.

Additionally, this year saw Rice Wind Energy significantly grow its overall digital footprint. On top of acquiring its windenergy@rice.edu email handle, both the Rice Wind Energy LinkedIn page and Rice Wind Energy website were established in 2024–2025, greatly expanding the team’s professional reach.

Overall, 2023–2024 was another year marked by significant learning and growth for the team. It marked several important points in Rice Wind Energy’s organizational history, chief of which was the founding of the Project Development and Connection Creation Subteams. This allowed Rice Wind Energy to compete in all categories of the CWC for the first time, playing a major role in the team’s first Phase III appearance, where it would eventually finish Top 10 in the nation.

Team membership also grew to new heights, with over 20 active members spanning the 4 subteams. Applying learnings from its Learn-along appearance in CWC 23′ the team continued to make significant engineering and organizational progress throughout the year, especially in blade optimization and overall turbine design.

Our second year as an organization, 2022–2023 marked a time of major learning and growth for the team. Despite many founding members having graduated, Rice Wind Energy (then Rice Wind Club) took its first steps towards becoming the team it is today.

This year marked our first-ever full CWC competition cycle, which helped us make significant and foundational strides towards better understanding turbine design. Additionally, member growth in 2022–2023 saw the founding of the Mechanical and Electrical (now Controls) teams, two subteams which now together serve as the backbone of Rice Wind Energy Engineering.

Rice Wind Energy was founded as an organization in the Spring of 2021, with the dream of someday competing in the U.S. Department of Energy Collegiate Wind Competition. Many of its founding members were soon-to-graduate upperclassmen, making the realization of that dream an uphill battle.

The trajectory of Rice Wind Energy would change in the Spring of 2022, after a winter GE Vernova externship and club advertising attracted several motivated underclassmen to the then fledging organization. Although its graduating founding members would never see it, their aspirations of prominently competing in the Collegiate Wind Competition would become a reality sooner rather than later.