Comet Wind, the competitive arm of UTD’s Wind Energy Club recently advanced to the final round in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2025 Collegiate Wind Competition as one of 12 finalist teams nationwide.
The annual 10-month long competition asks college teams to design a theoretical wind farm, focusing on everything from the engineering to the community outreach to the financial analysis involved through three main sub-competitions: turbine design, connection creation and project development. This year’s event required teams to design a floating offshore wind turbine — something Alyssa Tran, mechanical engineering senior and one of the team leads, said isn’t commonly seen in U.S. turbine designs, requiring them to innovate.
“The wind turbine has to be able to float on the water as it generates electricity, which is a real design that is implemented mostly in Europe [because] they have less land mass, so that has been a big challenge,” Tran said. “Our design team has been trying to tackle making a foundation that floats and then making blades, pitching mechanisms, generators.”
According to Varsha Thomas, computer engineering senior and team electrical lead, the main difference with designing an offshore turbine are the unique mechanical requirements.
“We don’t have to make sure our electronics float,” Thomas said. “We just have to make sure that they produce or convert the AC power to usable DC power. So that’s a lot of what we do on the electrical side of things, but the challenges are mostly for mechanical … you have to make something that’s stable enough to be in the water when wind is pushing at it.”
The competition is split into three phases. Each team has roughly three months during the summer to prepare an initial submission, showing interest and qualifications for the event, and qualifying teams move onto Phase 2 during fall semester to construct preliminary designs and reports for the wind farm. Winners of Phase 2 advance to Phase 3, the weeklong final round, where teams test out their turbine designs and present their final reports. Out of over 50 teams competing this year, only the top 12 qualified for Phase 3.
“It felt really good,” Tran said about the win. “We were quite worried this year because the challenges were so new, but we worked really hard, and we really appreciate all the work our members put in for all three of the sub-competitions because all three of our [propositions] had to be attractive to the judges for them to want to see us carry that out.”
For Thomas, currently in her first year as team lead, helping Comet Wind make it all the way to the finals was a major relief.
“When I’d become involved was when a lot of folks [had] been involved in the club for at least two years prior to when I joined,” Thomas said. “So being mentored by them over the last year was a really great experience, but this year it was me getting my feet wet as lead, so to know that we qualified to finals, like, OK, I haven’t screwed everything up, so it was a lot.”
According to Tran, the Wind Energy Club was started by four passionate students in 2021 who discovered the collegiate competition and decided to start participating. One of the purposes of the club is to have a competition team, and Tran said that club membership has grown to about 40 active members in 2025, with nine official members on the Comet Wind team. But while the club has a strong focus on the competition, it also hosts socials for members to build a community interested in sustainability and green energy.. Tran said the club welcomes all majors but generally sees more interest from engineering students and those seeking career opportunities.
“We have a lot of people that want to work in the wind industry or energy industry in the future more than just the general sustainability industry, and so they come to get the technical experiences that are provided in our club, but this year we have a great couple of members who are in [JSOM] that are on our project development team,” Tran said.
With Phase 3’s May 2 submission deadline on the horizon, Tran said the team is working in overdrive to finish its designs and bring them to life. The competition’s final event will take place May 12-15 at the University of Colorado Boulder, where along with overall wins in first, second and third place teams can also win in connection creation, project development, turbine prototyping and turbine testing.
“The Wind Energy Club is a great group of people who are all passionate about making a better future for ourselves,” Tran said. “So, we would love any support, and we would love to invite people who are interested in learning about any of the technicalities of what it takes to supply clean energy to the world and what it takes to convince people that it is a reasonable solution that we should be pursuing.”