Alaska Wind For Schools Program
The Alaska Center for Energy and Power welcomes students, teachers, and schools to engage in unique, tangible learning opportunities through our 2013 KidWind Challenge! If you are interested in opportunities for encouraging exciting energy education in your classroom and would like to compete in the 2013 competition, please contact Outreach Coordinator, Melody Moen (melody.moen@alaska.edu) for more information.
For details on scoring and power produced (watts) by turbines, please see the SCORING SPREADSHEET.
Teaching Alaska’s Youth about Sustainable Energy
The Alaska Center for Energy & Power has implemented the national Wind for Schools program in Alaska.
The program installs small wind turbines in rural elementary and secondary schools while developing Wind Application Centers at higher education institutions. This two-tier approach offers workforce development opportunities and hands-on science education for a wide range of ages.
Teacher training and hands-on curricula are implemented in each school to bring energy lessons into the classroom through interactive and interschool wind-related research tasks.
College students at Wind Application Centers assist in the assessment, design, and installation of small wind systems in the host schools, acting as wind energy consultants. They also participate in course work and other wind energy engineering projects, preparing them upon graduation to enter the energy workforce.
This effort requires collaboration from stakeholders throughout the state. Among these stakeholders are outreach coordinators, Renewable Energy Alaska Project, and other groups such as Alaska Youth for Environmental Action, Yukon Intertribal Watershed Council, and Western Community Energy.
This statewide team supports individual communities to form action plans for their schools. ACEP is also coordinating with national partners, Wind Powering America and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), who launched the first Wind for Schools project in 2005.
The program is open to any school in the state who meets the success criteria. Schools across Alaska are currently in various stages of planning. The first Alaskan school to install a turbine was Sherrod Elementary in Palmer. Click here for Sherrod Wind Turbine live production data.
Please contact Melody Moen at melody.moen@alaska.edu for information on how to bring this program to your school. Application forms can be downloaded from our application process page.
Wind Powering America sponsors the Wind for Schools Project which is intended to raise awareness of the benefits of wind in rural communities. A cookie cutter approach is used, to the greatest extent possible, in order to keep a basic and common configuration for all schools. This includes the installation of a small wind turbine, specifically the SkyStream 3.7, at a K-12 school. A curriculum which matches the SkyStream wind turbine has already been established and utilizes the NEED program. There are numerous schools throughout the state of Alaska currently in the planning stages to implement the Wind for Schools program into their school. In every participating state a Wind Energy Center is utilized to monitor and provide technical assistance to the schools as needed. WiDAC has already assumed the role of facilitator and will continue to promote and encourage this program.
