School is a great place to learn about natural resources and energy supply – and Kansas is lucky enough to be one of the six states involved in NREL’s pilot Wind for Schools project. Dan Nagengast of the Kansas Rural Center is facilitating the project through Ruth Douglas Miller and the Wind Application Center at K-State.
Most of the WfS turbines are Skystreams, which produce just under 2 kilowatts. They will back off 40-90% of the energy used in a typical home, but they aren’t sized to majorly offset the energy usage of a school.
However, the Skystreams have enormous educational value. They come with little radios that can transmit information to science classes. As the press release from the Concordia WfS project notes:
USD 333 Classrooms can immediately read, collect, and monitor data from the Skystream Wind Turbine. A two-way remote unit has been placed in Dustin Bender’s classroom and Concordia Jr. /Sr. High School. (Last September, Dustin was selected to attend the National Wind for Schools Conference in Golden, Colorado.) The remote box allows easy data access and also can control power of the turbine. Our goal in the near future is to make this information accessible through our USD 333 website.
Another neat aspect of WfS is how local communities and businesses pull together to get the turbines installed. Electric co-ops, contractors, volunteers – someone pours the pad, installs the pole, runs the line, etc. Another good exercise is figuring out siting -set-backs from buildings, electrical poles, and all those things you really don’t want a turbine to fall on. Highly unlikely, but it could happen.
For more a summary of the Kansas Wind for Schools accomplishments so far, you can read the following report from Ruth Douglas Miller at the K-State Wind Application Center.
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Here’s a summary of goings-on at the Kansas WAC and with Kansas Wind for Schools in 2008. This is a bit of a brain-dump; use what you need, and let me know if you need any more details. A few things haven’t happened yet but will in the next month or so. Dan’s been up to other things that aren’t included here.
We had 6 wind turbines installed:
2007-08 schools:
Fairfield HS (Langdon): mid-May
Sterling HS (Sterling): early June
Walton Elementary (Walton, Newton school district): mid-June
Concordia HS (Concordia): September
KSU campus: September
2008-09 schools:
Greenbush, Southeast KS Educational Center: September.
One more, at Ell-Saline HS (Brookville) is scheduled for installation the second week of November, weather permitting.
We received nine applications from school districts in April of 2007 and formally announced acceptance of five, with two alternates, this fall. The delay was due to wanting to visit sites before finalizing our choices. Besides Greenbush, mentioned above, the other 4 are Blue-Valley/Randolph, Deerfield, Rolla, South Barber County (Kiowa).
School staff at Rolla, observing the Entegrity installed at Moscow HS nearby, opted to decline a Skystream and pursue an Entegrity, so we brought in our first alternate, Pretty Prairie, to replace that school. At present Pretty Prairie, South Barber and Deerfield are deciding whether and how to pursue additional funding from the USDA for their projects. Funding from our largest utility may delay installation at Blue Valley/Randolph to 2009.
At KSU I taught a combined wind and solar system design class to 15 students in Spring 2008. Of those, three were graduate (Masters) students; the others seniors. Most were in electrical engineering; one was in architectural engineering. Eight were involved in siting turbines at WfS schools; the others pursued other projects including design of a solar system for KSU, design of a zero-energy building, construction of a tabletop wind turbine demonstration and construction of a stand-alone demonstration solar panel for displays on campus.
In Fall 2008 I directed 8 undergraduate students, 7 EEs and one Industrial Engineer, in wind siting projects at WfS schools, a Kansas Dept of Transportation site and a site belonging to the Kansas 4-H Foundation. We also visited three large wind farms nearby and one turbine refurbishing shop. Two of these students are doing honors research to build a web site displaying data from all our WfS turbines in something close to real time.
The WAC has been involved at some level in some 4 research proposals out of KSU this fall, and has received one internal grant to support development of the web site and further research into smart grid communications using the turbine data. We sent one of our grad students to NREL for training on set up of a small-wind testing site, and hope to be able to get something going along that line within the next year.
I gave six formal presentations about Wind for Schools (five invited): two to Kansas science teachers at conferences, one to Kansas School Board Association members, two to workshops for school facilities personnel, and one at the Kansas Renewable Energy Conference. An abstract has been submitted to AWEA for 2009 and other talks are scheduled for 2009 as well.
