It may have been fitting that it was a very windy day when the University of Nebraska at Kearney was having their new wind turbine installed, but one thing was for certain - it was cold.

That didn't stop a bundled-up installation crew from erecting the turbine.

A Tokyo based company called NIKKO donated the 45 feet tall 1 kilowatt turbine to UNK as a way to help them establish their presence in the United States. UNK decided to install it at the Nebraska Safety Center Driving Range south of campus.

Dr. Kenneth Trantham, a physics professor at UNK, said it's a great place for the turbine because it's so open.

"There's more wind out here. It's not blocked by a lot of buildings, this is a nice open area [with] high visibility [so] people can see it. As you can tell the wind is in full force out here," Trantham said.

The turbine will be used to record wind speed and energy output. Trantham said UNK will benefit from the turbine both in terms of research and because it will be "a nice engineering showpiece."

"NIKKO has also supplied some extra data collection hardware and computer to capture energy and wind speeds so that will be of interest to us," said Trantham. "We can compare that to some other research that we're doing on campus with other wind measurements and atmospheric science."

The data collected from the turbine will be shared with NIKKO. NIKKO also donated batteries and solar cells to charge them. Trantham said the energy will be used to power a street light at the range. He also said that in the future NIKKO plans to install an inverter box to convert the energy generated and put it on the power grid.

To hear more from an interview with Dr. Trantham or to see some footage of the wind turbine installation, click on the video links above.