At Taylor High School, students experiment with solar, wind powerOct 8 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Farzad Mashhood Austin American-StatesmanFour small wind turbines whir next to dozens of solar power cells, some of the panels adjustable, some following the sun throughout the day. Altogether the system produces enough energy to power six households. This alternative energy setup is not in the middle of some vast field owned by a utility company. It's outside Taylor High School, where the renewable energy club secured $132,000 in grants and awards for the cutting-edge equipment. On Tuesday morning, the club will present the system to school officials and classmates, providing a highly visible educational resource with some minor cost savings for the school. Students will be able to study electricity as the system generates about 1 percent of the school's power consumption, worth about $3,000 to $5,000 a year. "Electricity is just fascinating to me," said Sean Bullock, a Taylor senior who has been with Beginners Learning Alternative Designs for Energy, or BLADE, since the club started in January 2012. "It's really inspiring not just to me but, I think, to the other students who weren't fascinated by electricity." Taylor High is among dozens of schools in Central Texas with solar panels, but the club believes it is the only one with wind turbines. In the past several years, schools districts installed solar power systems for a variety of reasons, from lowering electric bills to serving as educational tools. For example, panels at Lake Travis Elementary and Lake Travis High School, installed in 2009, include monitoring systems and are used by science teachers as part of their curriculum. Panels at the Manor school district's middle schools perform a similar function, officials said. The BLADE club will install and program a computer system that allows them to adjust one set of the panels so they can experiment with how their angle affects how much power they can capture from the sun. "Winning the solar competition and adding a renewable energy source to the campus is fantastic. We will be able to put energy in to the building, lowering our cost and the panels can be used as a teaching tool for the science classes," Taylor High Principal Danny Ward wrote in an email. A small display inside the school's main entrance will show how much power the system is generating and what the school is using. "We're hoping that through this club and through the tools we have on the campus, we'll be able to bring a curriculum to the school," said John Jarmon, one of BLADE's mentors who works for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state's primary electric grid. The three sets of solar panels -- a stationary set on the band hall's roof; a set on a pole that follows the sun during the day; and a set on poles that students can adjust from their laptops -- and four small wind turbines were built mostly with $112,000 from a grant the school won from the Texas Comptroller's State Energy Conservation Office. The rest came as a $20,000 prize, half in cash and half in equipment, as the club's winnings for building a solar-powered van. The van, an old GMC Safari, still drives on its gas-powered engine but has a system of solar panels, batteries and inverters built in to power music, movies, video games and the batteries of an electric go-cart. Bullock and about a dozen other club members and their mentors will also visit the South by Southwest eco conference on Tuesday to present their club's work, particularly the award-winning van. Once the club is done with the final touches on the renewable system at the school, they'll move onto their next project: a plan to light a hike-and-bike trail with solar power. They hope to present it to Taylor's Parks Advisory Board this school year. http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=30234581& |