This Tuesday, First Wind will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the launch of commercial operations of the Milford Wind Corridor Project.  It’s another success for sustainable energy and it’s great for the local economy of the small town of Milford, UT.  Remarkably, it all started when a technology and engineering teacher at Milford High School named Andrew Swapp decided investigating wind energy with his students might make a good class project.
 
Swapp and his students started with handheld wind measuring devices, then installed a 20-meter tower for more accurate data collection.  This attracted a commercial developer who was interested in their wind speed data.  It looked promising.  It turned out their area receives very consistent daytime wind, which matches up nicely with electricity demand.  The developer bought them a taller measurement tower.  Later, Swapp’s students installed and became beta-testers of a small, grid-ready 1.8-kilowatt turbine for Southwest Windpower.  It ultimately lead to construction of the $400 million wind farm.

“My kids are experts now on wind devices.”  Swapp said and added that development of the commercial wind farm was like “bringing home the state championship in football” for the high school students.

“The students do better, the hallways are cleaner. Students are proud of the school now and the recognition it has received from the news media. They also have something to put in their resumes that will follow them the rest of their life. They are modern-day pioneers,” he said.

It’s truly a triumph of real-world, STEM education.  Great job Andrew Swapp and your students!

Get the full story in this Dept. of Energy article.

Here’s the Milford Wind site.
 
 One side note:  Andrew wrote us after watching our micro-documentary on Wind Farming with his students.  Here’s what he said:

“I just want you to know that (without bragging too much) my students are credited with attracting a large wind farm to our location. The groundbreaking ceremony was held in mid Oct. of last year. The 300MW wind farm was very hard to conceptualize until a friend sent me a link to your wind farm video. This really brought it home and put things in perspective.  Thanks for such great stuff!!!”
Andrew G. Swapp
Milford High School
Milford, UT

 Watch The Futures Channel’s video: The Wind Business

(Photo: US Department of Energy)

Tags: real world video, renewable energy, STEM Pipeline, Wind Farm

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 2:11 pm and is filed under STEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.