Students Start an Organization for Art about VY at GIV Winter Weekend

I'm here at the Governor's Institute Winter Weekend with 74 highly-motivated students from all over Vermont. I'm working with the Engineering strand, most of which is currently building rocket stoves, and a small handful of which is working creating a website for people to post art related to Vermont Yankee.

Now I've never built rocket stoves with my students, but I'm tempted to do so this year in conjunction with our study of energy. The trouble is that most of the students have covered the topic in chemistry (which is not to say that they remember it). It would be a way for us to get some hands-in experience with efficiency and biochar. I'm definitely interested in getting students to make and understand biochar.

These kids are so efficient in their work that this is mainly what I've been doing:

Vermont Community Energy Mobilization Project and a Recap

My gosh it's been a lot time since I posted anything here - over a month, in fact. 

I'll admit, part of my absence has been due to the new filtering system at the school combined with a shoddy internet connection at home, in addition to my own lack of motivation to post.  Which is not to say that there hasn't been anything interesting going on. So let's recap the last month or so. 

• In my classes we did egg bungee jumping - the goal is to get the egg as close to the ground as possible without breaking (pictured above). 
  
• My intern is two days into his soloing period with my largest class. 
  
• I'm agreed to work with the Vermont Community Energy Mobilization (VCEM) project with my students (more on that later). 
  
• I'm working with the Vermont Energy Education Program (VEEP) to do some school energy auditing 
  
• We had the Governor's Institute of Vermont Winter Weekend again. 
  
• And now we're on break until next Wednesday (yay!) 

I think my body knows that it's vacation and plans to get sick then on purpose, which is fine with me ~ I'd rather be sick now than have to take time off from school. 

So the Vermont Community Energy Mobilization (VCEM) is a program put on by Efficiency Vermont where volunteers get trained (3 hrs worth) and then at a later date, like some Saturday, all the volunteers meet at some central location, Efficiency Vermont gives them a ton of materials and some housing assignments (they know you're coming), and off you go. You actually go to people's houses and install 

• up to 5 CFLs per house 
  
• a programmable thermostat
  
• insulation for electric hot water heaters 
  
• 6' of pipe insulation for hot water pipes  
  
• low-flow shower heads and faucet attachments, etc. 
  
• In addition, volunteers collect information about the house's foundation, attic insulation, refrigerator, as well as family's willingness to receive a call from Efficiency Vermont about those items. 

So the idea is to get students involved. Teams composed of 2 students (minimum) and 1 adult (minimum) could go do this work in people's homes. I've scheduled the training to take place during school hrs, but the volunteer days will almost certainly be on a Saturday, so how do I get students to show up on a Saturday? Offer it as an alternative to the Final Exam. Yep. This plus a write up about how much energy they saved and what it was like for them and BOOM! Done. Final is over. I had so many kids volunteering. This is going to be great.   

Governor's Institute of Vermont for Engineering

Yet again, I've spent too much time away from blogging and more than I can communicate has transpired.

So let's start with the the Governor's Institute of Vermont for Engineering. (more pictures available at this website!)

This was a packed week of fast paced, hard-playing, frisbee-loving, explosion-watching, and project-building. 130 kids, half from VT, half from around the country and the world gathered at UVM to study aeronautical engineering, robotics, or renewable energy systems and sustainability. We had presentations from such illustrious figures as John Cohn, Kerri Bernstein, and Lt. Governor Brian Dubie, all the while working on some project of their choosing. I worked with the Renewable Energy and Sustainability strand, which had a lot of fascinating projects. Here are a few sketches of my favorite projects:

1) The 4-inch Nozzle Boys
A guy in Montpelier has developed a retro-fit for your home fuel oil burner to burn pellets instead. Unfortunately, you need a 6-inch nozzle to make that happen, and most standard oil burners have a 4-inch nozzle. So these guys took a 4-inch pipe and burned pellets through it to see how efficient that process could be. Well... I should say, most of the work was done in the construction of the device and not the data taking, but they did learn a whole lot through building it. We actually got Jock Gill and Andy Boutin to come up and play with these guys for a couple days, and they had a blast!

2) the solar trough
This group constructed a parabolic trough, lined it with sections of flat mirror and then put a copper pipe along the focal line. They measured the temperature increase over time and the observed the drop in water level over time, and were able to do some yummy calculations from that. I just heard today that an article using a similar principle was published in a recent version of IEEE, only the device was a mile long, but could generate an enormous amount of power.

3) Emergency Stoves or Stoves for Humanity
The problem: in emergency situations people gather fuel to burn in open fires which are not very efficient. If you have two large tin or steel cans you can remedy this. So this group focused on a simple two-can stove design that could be built using only a bottle opener and a can opener (which one would assume you'd also have), and created a cartoon that could be printed on the cans (without words) so that people anywhere would understand how to construct such a device.

4) UNPAC
The United Packaging Adjustment Cooperative came out of this group, which was inspired by Dawn Densmore of UVM. She has been working to reduce packaging in the US through working towards requiring packaging information to be printed on the package. The students designed a logo that could published on a label that would include the %recycled content, the %recyclability, the average distance traveled by the product, and the %of the package by weight compared to the product - all hoping that the information available will pressure industries to package products more reasonably.

All these groups and more were judged by a panel at the University Mall in Burlington and given awards in a variety of areas. Sssshhh don't tell, but my dad and ex-boyfriend were on the panel *gasp*!

I got a real kick when one of the kids was like "check out that guy's beard", referring to my dad, "tell me you don't want that beard! That is so cool". Haha. Thanks kid.

My other favorite moment was the Condiment Duel at the Sandbar State Park, where Andrew challenged me to a duel so I got to use strawberry sauce and i made him use whipped cream.

Warning: Student on Fire!

One of the Montpelier students who attended the GIV Winter Weekend last weekend has now made it her mission in life to change the school's heating system over to something renewable. The whole thing made the channel 5 news which you can watch here... as long as you aren't trying to use Safari or Firefox (at least I haven't had much luck with them. Perhaps you need Windows Media Player?).

She has already spoken with the head of the school grounds and when he was like, "neither wood pellets nor wood chips will work" she said something like, "I cannot accept that oil is our only option".  Wow. Oh my gosh. This girl rocks!  

I told her about the District Heating Project with the Biomass Energy Research Center so she found their number, got some good information from them, and we're off and running. It's really refreshing to see how much energy she has to put towards this. 

It looks like I'll be advising an independent study for her around this stuff - I recommended it since she will be doing this work anyway. 

Biomass for Home Heating in Vermont

The most exciting part of the Governor's Institute of Vermont (GIV) Winter Weekend was the movement to act on an idea.

Last year a junior at Mt. Abe Union HS went to the VT State Legislature to talk about the potential for biomass fuels as a renewable home-heating option. The legislator who invited them said, "We like your ideas, come back next year with more people". So that Junior (now a Senior) came to the GIV Weekend, and told kids about her work on biomass for home heating systems.

A less-than-ideal-though-likely scenario for Vermonters:
Let's say the price of oil skyrockets to the point of basically being... well, unaffordable. What do we do? Most of us have wood-stoves, so being the independent problem-solvers that we are, we start going out to cut down trees. But do we have enough trees to sustainably harvest to heat everyone's homes? No. Our initial estimates were that we could harvest 1 ton of biomass per acre per year of wood. This is not enough. (I have not done this calculation myself, though I would really like to). Even so - we end up with wide-spread deforestation, which leads to a lack of tourism - Vermont's biggest industry.

A better solution for Vermonters:
What if we could heat our homes with something renewable that didn't shoot our forests? Turns out high-density perenials like switch grass, Jerusalem artichoke, and Japanese knotweed grow at very high densities every year. This means we could harvest 15-20 tons per acre per year sustanably. That's huge! And hopefully enough (again - I need to do this calculation).

These crops could then be turned into pellets to be burned in a pellet stove, but there's not a lot of pellet stoves in Vermont, so there's not much demand for pellets, so no one makes pellets, so no one has a pellet stove - here again is our chicken-egg catch 22. So the idea would be that the state of Vermont could help home owners buy pellet stoves, thus creating a market for pellets, and then we could have a centralized pellet station, to which farmers and land owners could bring their crops for pelletization.

Local. Renewable. Home Heating Fuel.

This would keep more money in the state of Vermont thus creating a multi-million dollar stimulus to the Vermont economy.

So that's what we're proposing. It's beautiful. I'm getting my students involved. We're going to the statehouse :)

Biodiesel is Kind of Nasty

This past weekend I co-taught at the Vermont Governor's Institute Winter Weekend (which mainly advertizes the summer program). All the summer programs were represented there, and students could choose which "strand" they wanted to pursue (e.g. Arts, Music, Current Events, Youth Activism, Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics), but the general theme for all the strands was Global Warming... and what we can do about it.

It was, in a word, phenomenal. Everyone came out of it completely psyched to carry on the work they started. We I got to help students plan how they would change their schools when they got back. And the best part was we are hopefully taking some students to the legislature to propose a bill around biomass, but that's for another post. In fact, this weekend will undoubtedly supply fodder for many many subsequent posts.

But, more to the point of this post: One of the highlights from the weekend was making Biodiesel. Ken Oldrid (pictured below) of GreenDiesels.net led a workshop in which we made biodiesel. Here's the general plan:

Heat up vegetable oil
Mix together NaOH (sodium hydroxide) and methanol - shake until dissolved
Mix methanol and NaOH solution together with warm vegetable oil - shake even harder and longer
Wait until it the liquid separates into two layers (glycerin on top, biodiesel on the bottom)
Pour or syphon off glycerin layer.

If you wanted to use straight veggie oil in you diesel car, it'd get all gummed up because it's too thick. So to thin it out, you'd just need to heat up the vegetable oil. And then start and end your run with regular diesel so that it doesn't solidify in your engine.

Ok, let's compare:

• Biodiesel requires two extremely dangerous chemicals (NaOH will give you a chemical burn if it gets on your skin, and Methanol is one of the primary ingredients form making meth so you actually can't buy methanol in Vermont. Methanol was so dangerous we had to go outside to open it up, and in addition to that he told us not to breath while it was open!)
• OR
• Vegetable Oil requires a 2nd tank and a heater in addition to a regular diesel tank.

Which is easier for mass production? Which is safer for mass production?
I think you get my point.

This means I'm jumping off the biodiesel train and moving more towards vegetable oil.
Yay for clarity and information.