By Sam Horner
The Northern Lights Community School (NLCS) requested a Winter Workshop centered around the topic of energy, so that is what they got! The NLCS YES! team is learning all about electricity and energy, so they got to see where their school’s energy comes from. The team took a short trip to Lake Country Power in Grand Rapids.
The team was met at the facility by engineers and managers of the facility. They started off by talking about how a Energy Coop works. They are member owned and are not trying to make a profit. They want to get the energy to their members for a low cost and they work with the members to make them more energy efficient. They also explained the technology they use, including how they know whether their members have lost power and the new meters that they are implementing with their members. The team and the presenters then had a conversation about how energy is transported to the members.
After the indoor portion of the presentation, the team traveled to the substation where the team was able to visualize the aspects of energy generation that they had discussed earlier in the day. They saw transformers, relays and the circuit breakers and got an explanation for how each of them work.
The plan is for the team to go back to their school and sometime this spring do an energy audit of their building with staff from Lake Country Power in order to learn more about how the school can become even more energy efficient and to solidify their learnings from this Winter Workshop!
