Clean Energy Topic: Power Grid
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Future Needs of the PNW Hydropower System
Students will evaluate the arguments for breaching the snake river dams, and the arguments against the breach. They will assess cost/benefit assessments, stakeholder positions, and possible solutions.
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Electrical Engineering: Why Does the Electrical System Break Down?
This unit, developed through the Ambitious Science Teaching framework, attempts to create cohesive, model-based learning experience for high school level physics students to explore these concepts through the anchoring event of a power outages. They will explore our electrical system from simple circuits and the function of a switch, tracing the electrical energy back through…
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Clean Water Power: Wind, Waves, and Moving Water
This unit strives to answer the question: “How can the power of moving help communities by generating electricity?” Through a variety of lessons centered on the phenomena of the power of moving water, students will develop skills in circuits, model building, and testing. Students will explore issues surrounding clean water, energy, and careers.
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Ecological Interactions Between PNW Keystone Species
Students will examine the decline in chinook salmon and how the loss of this keystone species is impacting the South resident killer whale populations.
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Optimal and Sustainable: Renewable Energy Revamp
In this lesson, students will be challenged with an optimization problem. The fictitious town of Solutionville has decided to replace coal, their current source for electricity, with more sustainable energy sources. In designing Solutionville’s sustainable energy future, students must consider not only the geographic constraints of various renewable energy options–wind energy, hydroelectric power, geothermal energy,…
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Chemical Differences in Emergency Energy Sources
In the context of preparing a disaster supply kit, students develop atomic and molecular models of energy resources, analyze combustion of various fuels and build circuits. They then research and evaluate the impacts of converting natural resources into PV cells. Finally, students engineer a hand warmer that uses an exothermic chemical reaction (5 lessons).
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When the Grid Goes Down and Stays Down
Through an examination of media published in the five months following Hurricane Maria in 2017, students will develop an understanding of the electrical grid, the vulnerabilities of a grid system, and the immediate and long-term challenges of living without an electrical grid. This lesson will lay the foundation for the rest of the unit, establishing…