Windy Weather Has School's Wind Turbine Going Non-Stop
UPDATED: 10/27/10 4:15 p.m.
CHICAGO (WBBM/CBS) - How windy is it? It's too windy even for a wind turbine.
"It's just going non-stop."
John Mertes, director of technology at Rhodes elementary school in River Grove says in the year and a half since the school installed a wind turbine, they've never seen it like this.
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"It's just been going from midnight to midnight every hour on the hour, producing over a kilowatt hour or more, sometimes hitting two."
With the full sun and the persistent winds on Wednesday, students at Rhodes were able to see firsthand how powerful the wind can be.
"The month of October itself has been kind of a quiet month. But then all of a sudden yesterday was that big strong spike," Mertes told CBS 2's Mary Kay Kleist.
The turbine was spinning so fast, that a circuit breaker had to kick in.
"It comes down to the RPM's - how fast that blade and turbine can spin and it does reach a point where it needs to stop itself. Otherwise it could damage it."
Over a year and a half, the Rhodes school turbine has produced a total of around 3,000 kilowatt hours of energy. On Tuesday alone, it generated 40 hours, a new record for the school.
Overall, that's just a fraction of the energy that the school consumes, but it would cover about 25 percent of a home's energy needs, Mertes said. It would be enough energy to power a TV for 278 hours.
The turbine was installed mostly for educational purposes and Mertes used the wind storm as an opportunity to teach his 8th grade students about weather.
"That's what low pressure is all about. This is a unique time. When the storm came through, this low pressure is what's causing this massive wind, of that circular, counter clockwise motion," Mertes said. "I'm not sure we'll ever have this again, so we have a great opportunity to see it firsthand."
"We're excited with how far can it go? Like how long can this thing keep spinning and how much energy does this storm really have. It's kind of an exciting time for us," Mertes added.
Right now, the turbine powers the garage at Rhodes and feeds energy into the school.
Student Danielle Coco said, "We did a project on it in science class to see how much it was producing, and what we got to use from it." Having the wind turbine right on the school property makes it so much more interesting to learn science, instead of just reading about it in a textbook.
Diana Diaz, an 8th grader at Rhodes, said, "I am more like a visual learner in real life. When I see it in a book, it doesn't really interest me, but this definitely interests me much more."
Classmate Lewis Monett agreed.
"Once you come outside and you can actually see it, like right there, it interests you more and it makes you want to learn more about it, to see how it works and how it helps our school," Monett said.
"When you see it, and you hear it, and you understand that it's not scary, it's just something you can do, it's fun," Mertes said.
You can track the turbine's energy production through on the Web. CLICK HERE
