Aaron Sebens and his class of fourth-graders from the Central Park
School for Children in Durham, North Carolina hit Kickstarter back in
March to try and raise enough money for their classroom to go off-grid. A
rather modest target of US$800 was smashed within a day by the kindness
of the international community and, at campaign end,
the kids found themselves with the handsome sum of $5,817 to spend on
the purchase and installation of a roof-mounted solar energy harvesting
system. A wind turbine was added to the shopping list, and just two
months later, the 208ers threw a huge "Flip the Switch" party to
celebrate leaving the grid. Sebens reports that the classroom has been
running on renewables ever since.
The original idea to power the classroom from solar came from
discussions in lessons, so it will come as no surprise that the project
has since been used as fodder for math, writing, and science lessons,
including the design and testing of different wind turbines.
"When we raised more money than we thought, we upgraded our system
substantially, more panels, more batteries, and a better inverter that
is grid tie capable," says Sebens. "All of the energy is currently
stored in batteries but we hope to move to grid tie eventually (it's a
lot of permits, time, and paperwork). We used the rest of the money to
make and ship Kickstarter rewards and to do a wind turbine engineering
project. Every 4th grader designed and built their own wind turbine and
we tested to see which were able to generate the most electricity."
Support for the project has come in from all corners, including a tweet from the White House that linked to the US Department of Energy video below.
0 comments:
Post a Comment