High school students in Morgan County have erected a wind turbine that they designed and built themselves. The Morgan County Career and Technology Center now has two wind mills and a solar array on its Cumberland Plateau campus.
This newest turbine is 112 feet tall and has a modest 2.4 kilowatt capacity. That compares to industrial wind mills mostly out west that have the ability to produce more than a thousand kilowatts.
While small in scale, instructor Ronnie Trout says interest in renewable energy is attracting a new kind of student to his welding class, which pulls from area high schools.
“I’ll just be honest about it. Use to, you would get a lot of run-of-the-mill, low academic reaching students. But since I’ve started this project, matter of fact I’ve got the valedictorian from two schools in my classes right now.”
The wind mills are funded with grant money. Trout says the Tennessee Valley Authority does pay 12-cents per kilowatt hour for the power put onto the grid, which isn’t enough to fund construction.
“But you take 8, 10, 12, $16 a day just for one windmill times 365 days a year and you put it back into a program for education, that’s just like pumping new blood back into someone.”
The turbine installed this week was paid for with $45,000 from the Appalachian Regional Commission.
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