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Scoraig Wind Turbine Workshop 2010: Building a 3-Metre Turbine from Scratch
Viderpolate Scoraig Wind Turbine Workshop 2010 — Build your own wind turbine from scratch
On a remote peninsula in north-west Scotland with no road access and no grid connection, people turn up every year to build a wind turbine from scratch under Hugh Piggott's guidance, the man who's lived off-grid there since 1974. The 2010 workshop was entirely international: no UK residents took part. Participants came from Estonia, Germany, France, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Together, they built and tested a 3-metre diameter turbine that produced 600 to 700 watts peak.
Build Every Part By Hand
This isn't a weekend hobby; it's a full, hands-on build from winding coils and assembling magnet disks to erecting the tower and firing it up for the first time. By the end of the week, every participant has physically built every part of the machine.
Who Is Hugh Piggott?
Hugh Piggott is a legend in small wind power. He's lived on Scoraig since 1974, arrived as a back-to-the-land idealist and never left. Scoraig has no road, no power lines, and no grid connection. Everything that runs there runs on wind, solar, or micro-hydro. Piggott has spent decades figuring out how to make small wind turbines work reliably in demanding conditions, and more importantly, how to teach other people to build them.
Unconventional Path To Wind Power
His background is unconventional. Educated at Cambridge, he chose a remote Scottish peninsula over an academic career. After a decade of building and fixing turbines alone, he went on a windpower course at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) to learn properly. He ended up teaching there instead. In the 1990s he worked with factory-built turbines and discovered that even commercial machines fail in real conditions — a lesson that sharpened his focus on robustness and repairability in his own designs.
I've done wind jobs in Africa designing turbines for local make, plus Sri Lanka and Peru helping communities build permanent magnet alternators for small setups. That practical dirt underpins everything in my courses and my books, including the widely referenced Wind Turbine Recipe Book.
The 2010 Workshop: What Happened
The 2010 Scoraig workshop was notable for its international spread of participants. None were from the UK — a first for these workshops. The group included people from:
- Estonia
- Germany
- France
- Canada
- Mexico
- Brazil
- Argentina
William and Cathy, residents of Scoraig, provided the use of their space for the workshop. The participants worked through the full build process across several days, covering three main areas:
- Wood work — building the turbine blades from wood, shaping and balancing them
- Metal work — assembling the hub, building the tower mount, and fitting the alternator housing
- Electronics — winding the coils for the axial flux alternator, wiring the charge controller, and testing
Finished turbine's a 3-metre diameter unit spinning out 24VDC. In decent wind it hits 600 to 700 watts peak, which is a meaningful load for an off-grid spot. That's enough to run lights, charge phones and laptops, and keep a small fridge ticking over, especially when you've got a battery bank and solar panels backing it up.
The Axial Flux Alternator: Why It Matters
The guts of any Hugh Piggott turbine is that axial flux alternator. It's flat like a disk brake, not using those curved magnetic fields you see in conventional units. Two rotors with magnets spin past stationary coils bolted to a stator plate. The result is a machine simple enough to build, easy to fix, and highly efficient at the low RPM ranges where these small wind turbines actually run.
Piggott's Turbine Design Specs
Piggott's been tweaking this design for years, and his Recipe Book lays out the full specs on poles, coil counts, wire gauges, and winding details. Back in that 2010 workshop, we built a three-metre turbine using ferrite or ceramic magnets, which was the standard before neodymium prices crashed, with twelve coils arranged in a ten-pole setup. We wound each coil with thirty-seven turns of 2 x 1.6mm wire, hooking it all up in a three-phase configuration.
Test Alternators Before Assembly
Axial flux alternators are the ones that matter for DIY because you can test them while you're building. Before you slap on blades or erect the tower, you spin the unit by hand or with a drill and check the voltage. If the numbers match what you expect, you know the electrical side is sound before you commit to the full assembly.
The Windy Scottish Reality
Scoraig isn't for beginners. It's a peninsula sticking out into the North Atlantic, getting hammered by strong winds. The average speeds there are high enough that a decent small turbine will crank out meaningful power for most of the year. But that same wind is exactly what puts the designs to the test and exposes every single weakness.
Piggott's designs get tested in one of the windiest inhabited places in Europe, so a machine that lasts on Scoraig will last almost anywhere. The blades are wood, which is simple to repair with basic tools anywhere in the world, unlike fibreglass or carbon fibre. The electronics are kept minimal, the tower is sturdy, and everything is designed to be maintained by someone with basic mechanical skills and no factory support.
Wind Power For Australian Off-Grid Systems
For off-grid property owners in Australia, the lessons from Scoraig translate well. Australian wind patterns in coastal and elevated areas can be energetic. A Hugh Piggott-style turbine is an excellent complement to solar — wind keeps generating through the night and through cloudy periods that would shut down a solar-only system. Use our wind power calculator to estimate what a small turbine can produce at your location.
What Participants Take Away
The real value of the Scoraig workshop in 2010 wasn't the turbine itself. By the end of the week, every participant had wound coils, pressed magnet disks, assembled the hub, shaped blades, and wired a charge controller. We watched the machine go up on a tower and saw it start generating. You don't just know how it works, you understand why each design decision was made.
That know-how transfers straight to anything bigger or smaller you build. The same principles running that 3-metre Scoraig turbine let you sort out your own machine when it bites, fix it without waiting on parts from a factory, and show someone else the ropes. In the developing world where Piggott has spent years, that self-sufficiency isn't a nice-to-have; it is the whole point.
Books and Plans
If you can't make it to Scoraig, Piggott's written materials are the next best thing. His Wind Turbine Recipe Book is a 64-page manual covering how to build wind turbines in a range of sizes and voltages. It is the document he uses in his own courses, and it has been translated into multiple languages. It covers the full build process with tables, diagrams, and specifications.
His earlier book, Windpower Workshop, is more of a reference work, broader in scope but less detailed in build instructions. It's useful for understanding the range of wind turbine types and their characteristics, even if you aren't building your own.
Both books are available through Piggott's website, with region-specific editions (metric or imperial units) so you get the right measurements for your materials.
Recommended Products (Amazon AU)
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Small Wind Power in Australia
Queensland's got plenty of wind outside the big grid farms. For us off-gridders, a small turbine is the difference between power that lasts all year and a system that bogs down in winter.
The key considerations for small wind in Australia:
- Average wind speed at your site — use our wind power calculator to estimate output based on your local conditions
- Tower height — wind speed increases significantly with height. A 10-metre tower can produce 30 to 50 percent more power than a 5-metre tower at the same site
- Solar-wind hybrid — wind and solar complement each other. Wind keeps generating through cloudy weather and at night. Pairing a small turbine with solar panels reduces battery drain in winter and extends system resilience during extended cloudy periods
- Regulation — some local councils have restrictions on tower heights. Check before erecting a tall mast
A 3-metre diameter turbine like the one built at Scoraig, operating in a location with an average wind speed of 5 to 6 metres per second, will produce roughly 1,500 to 2,500kWh per year. That is a meaningful contribution to a small off-grid home, particularly in winter when solar output is at its lowest.
The Course Today
Hugh Piggott's been running workshops at Scoraig since 2010, and the model's been picked up by outfits like V3 Power Co-op in the UK and Eirbyte in Ireland. The format stays the same: a crew of punters with zero wind turbine experience spends a week building a working unit from scratch under expert guidance.
Prices and availability change year to year. Check Hugh Piggott's blog at scoraigwind.co.uk for the current course calendar. Accommodation at Scoraig is in the bunkhouse, with meals included — the cost reflects the remote location and the all-inclusive nature of the week.
Build Your Own Wind Turbine
If you cannot attend in person, the Wind Turbine Recipe Book is the most comprehensive written guide to building a Piggott-style turbine. Pair it with the wind power calculator to size your system, and read our battery sizing guide to understand storage requirements for a wind-solar hybrid off-grid system.
Original video and turbine design by Hugh Piggott. OffGrid Masterplan is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Affiliate links may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.
Worth a watch: Assembly and test of a 3 metre turbine at Scoraig in June · Hugh Piggott
Frequently asked questions
Who is Hugh Piggott and what does he do?
Hugh Piggott runs the Scoraig workshop up in the remote Scottish Highlands and has spent decades teaching people to build their own small wind turbines. He came up with the axial flux alternator design that a lot of Aussie off-gridders now copy because it actually works at low RPM. The man is hands-on — you turn up, you build a real working turbine, and you take it home.
What actually happens at the Scoraig wind turbine workshop?
You spend about a week building a complete 3-metre turbine from bare materials — blades, alternator, tail, tower mount, the lot. The 2010 session pulled in participants from seven countries, so it's a real mix of sparkies, farmers and weekend tinkerers all working side by side. By the end of the week you've wound your own coils, shaped blades, and walked away with a working turbine ready to install.
What's an axial flux alternator and why does it matter?
An axial flux alternator is a generator where the magnets and coils face each other across a thin gap, which keeps it light, efficient and easy to build by hand. It matters because most off-the-shelf alternators aren't designed for the slow RPMs a small wind turbine actually spins at — an axial flux unit matches the blade speed properly. Two people with a drill press and a workbench can wind one in a few days.
Can I build a small wind turbine in Australia or is it only for Scotland?
The Scoraig design was built for savage Scottish weather, so the steel and engineering handle central QLD squalls no worries — I've personally blown two sets of my own 3-metre blades before I built one the Scoraig way. The honest answer is you need a decent average wind speed, which rules out most suburban blocks in Australia. On a proper rural block with consistent wind though, a 3-metre build is a brilliant slow-and-steady top-up for a battery bank alongside solar.