An electrician installs parts of their metering system

The Mankato West YES! Team, winners of the YES! Grand Prize Award, has been working hard.  The main goal of their YES! team this year was to install a real-time monitor of the electrical-consumption of their school and display this information publicly.

The components necessary for this monitoring system were just installed and the team is now able to collect data on the electrical usage of one-third of the school campus.  The YES! students will next work to create a useful way to display this data on a monitor in a public location in the school.  They are excited to allow all of the students of Mankato West High School to see how much electricity the school is using and how much that is costing the school.

Some of the numbers available from the meter

YES! awards were presented within each cohort. Unless otherwise indicated, Grand Prize winners received $1,500; Second Place winners received $1,000; Third Place winners received $750; and all Category Award winners received $500 each.

See what each team accomplished by reading more on the Teams page.

Grand Prize

• Pine Island & Mankato West ($1,250 each)
• Litchfield
• Sleepy Eye
• Royalton ($500 as an overall award in Northern YES! cohort)

2nd Place

• ACGC
• Westbrook-Walnut Grove

3rd Place

• Chatfield
• Willmar
• Springfield

Goal-setting & Teamwork
For working together to set goals and engage all members in the work

• Pine Island
• Lac qui Parle Valley
• Cedar Mountain

Energy Efficiency & Conservation

For achieving great energy-related outcomes this season, and outlining the energy saved or to be saved in the future due to their work

• Austin & Rochester Mayo ($250 each)
• Minnewaska
• Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop

Southeast YES! Coordinator pictured with Pine Island award winning student and coach

Economic Potential
For demonstrating economic impact in their community – generating or saving money through their work

• Chatfield
• Willmar
• Westbrook-Walnut Grove

Creativity & Innovation
For showing a new way of addressing challenges or using a new innovative technology or process to achieve their project goals

• Mankato East
• New London-Spicer
• Sleepy Eye

Community Involvement
Demonstrated a high level of community outreach and involvement in their work

• Northfield
• Litchfield
• Sleepy Eye

Skills & Career Awareness
Through their project(s), team members gained new skills or improved upon skills needed in today’s workplace

• Mankato West
• ACGC
• Redwood Valley

 A special THANK YOU to this year’s award sponsors:

Special thanks to Rob Palmer, Aaron Larson, Michelle Shyhorst and Zoe Vossen for showcasing your great work!

YES! on display at Alexandria Eco Fair.

Youth Energy Summit team members from Alexandria’s Jefferson High School participated in the 3rd annual Community Eco Fair in Alexandria, MN on April 19, 2012. The Team made an impact by volunteering to be greeters, serving food, assisting exhibitors with loading in and attending the YES! booth. The YES! booth demonstrated the different amounts of energy it takes to light up an incandescent light bulb versus the energy it takes to light up a CFL using a hand crank generator and they created a coloring activity on the beauty and benefits of native landscaping. YES! sparked interest in energy facts to a large crowd by asking questions and giving out prizes. The Fair drew a crowd of over 1,000 people looking to learn more about earth friendly life style choices.

…it’s about all the good works, positive action, and real accomplishments made by every one of the YES! teams this season. We encourage you to learn about what each team worked on this season by exploring their season’s summaries on the Team Page. Simply click on the team names, where hyperlinked, to open the pdf that summarizes their season.

Litchfield makes the news!

“Litchfield High School students involved with FCCLA and the YES! teams obtain grants, help from local business to retrofit hydration stations above existing drinking fountains to encourage the use of reusable water bottles.” Article from the Litchfield Independent Review.

Read more: Litchfield Mar29-2012

WWG YES! students band together to protect the environment

A small, but mighty group of students from Westbrook-Walnut Grove High School are not only learning about the environment around them, they’re actually doing something to improve it.

The WWG Y.E.S. (Youth Energy Summit) students have recently been working on a number of projects that are geared toward improving the environment.

“This group has done a series of projects, from recycling about 500 pounds of Christmas lights, to 600 pounds of tennis shoes, to over 50 cell phones as well as giving over $700 worth of equipment to the public library and purchasing a wind turbine for the school,” said Patrick Merrick, WWG teacher and Y.E.S. adviser.

Students have put up posters and flyers around the school campuses to encourage participation in the cell phone project. Collected cell phones will be sent to GRC Wireless Recycling, where they will be 100 percent recycled.

According to WWG senior Kasia Her, about 60 percent of the recycled cell phones will be refurbished and go to markets worldwide in need of affordable communication. The rest will be shredded and smelted at a copper refiner or reclaimed back its natural state.

“All the projects went well,” Her said. “These projects were easy to do and anyone can do these projects to save the environment.”

The WWG Y.E.S. group received money for each phone it collected for recycling, with all profits going to the WWG Earth Y.E.S. lending library.

“The purpose of the lending library is to encourage the community to save energy by buying devices such as kilowatt meters, heat sensors and more,” Her said. “These devices will be located in the library where they can check out and use to their advantage to save energy.”

The idea for environmental projects came about two years ago. Merrick said that students participated in the Y.E.S. program then as an extra-curricular activity. Y.E.S. is a team-oriented youth program that uses hands-on, experimental learning and energy action projects to address energy opportunities and issues in rural Minnesota communities.

After enough students found value in the concept, they petitioned the school board to allow it to be incorporated into an environmental science class. Last year, Merrick’s newly-formed class focused primarily on electricity conservation and recycling. In class, students would learn about a topic, design a project, implement it and then take it to the community.

A contest is held annually, judging teams on the projects they do throughout the year. This year’s contest takes place on April 19.

“Before every major topic, we spent several weeks learning about the how, what and why of the idea,” WWG seniors Maddie Frank and Shawn Hanson said in their class summary.

One of the goals, Frank and Hanson said, was to find out how much energy their school used throughout a regular school day.

“We decided to conduct a school energy audit,” they said. “We divided up the classrooms between the students in our class. Each student measured the amount of watts being used in each classroom.”

Then team members divided the watts by 1,000 and multiplied that number by how many hours each device was used during the day.

“We were then able to figure out how much it cost to run each room for one day,” they said. “As a school total, we spend $31.72 in energy every day.”

Hanson and Frank also pointed out that their bike generator has the potential to create 400 watts.

“We’re planning to use it to convert energy into electrical energy to charge iPads and laptops for student use,” they said.

The small wind turbine project also has a lot of potential, students said. The wind turbine, about six feet across from tip to tip is capable of producing 1,000 watts and 48 volts.

“As a class, we have decided to put this up in our small bus garage, where we hope to power the lights and a pop machine that is used during football season,” Frank and Hanson said. “We plan to hook it up off the grid so that we don’t need to go through the power company for insulation.”

The class is currently in the process of ordering an inverter, batteries and other equipment so that the wind turbine can start functioning in the next few weeks.

While their team projects will soon be judged against projects from other school districts, the WWG students have already found success.

“We have been able to save money with the help of our school energy audit, make money with both the shoe and the cell phone recycling, keep a large amount of garbage out of the our landfills with those recycling projects and made it possible for community members to use energy-saving devices with our newly-available lending library,” Frank and Hanson said.

The students’ efforts align with their overall mission: “Through experimental and educational endeavors, the WWG Y.E.S. group strives to make a difference in our local society by changing our habits into the values that we want to pass onto future generations.”

And while the group is working toward making a difference in the environment around them, it’s quick to give credit to and offer their appreciation for the support from their surrounding communities.

“Without the help of our community and school, we would not have been able to make these recycling projects possible,” Hanson and Frank said.

Read the original article here.

Willmar 5th graders get up close and personal with solar thermal panels heating the greenhouse.

The Willmar Community Greenhouse is attracting more attention: It’s featured on Minnesota Department of Education’s homepage, Minnesota School Nutrition Association’s homepage, and in a statewide presentation about new school nutrition regulations.

Meanwhile, rotating groups of 5th graders toured Willmar Community Greenhouse this week, learning about the fresh, local produce being grown for the high school cafeteria, along with the biomass burner and solar thermal panels that heat the greenhouse. The fennel, broccoli, and borage the elementary students tasted was all grown over the winter in the greenhouse, alongside diverse varieties of greens that have so far yielded nearly 200 pounds to the Willmar High School cafeteria. Meanwhile, other 5th graders were nearby testing their hands at designing miniature wind turbines, making s’mores in a solar oven, and generating electricity with a bicycle.

The education event was planned by Willmar’s YES! team, and taught by a combination of YES! team members and high school biology students. Willmar YES! coach is Rob Palmer. Aaron Larson manages the greenhouse, and Annette Derouin is Willmar’s Food Service Coordinator.

Oh, and what is borage, anyway? It’s an herb with a small, purple, edible flower. How do the petals taste? Sweet, like honey, says Aaron, who was leading the tour. The 5th graders, though, say borage “tastes like purple.”

It's green in the Willmar Community Greenhouse!

The Willmar Community Greenhouse has been up and running all season – providing healthy, fresh greens to the Willmar Senior High School only two blocks away.  Their work was recently highlighted in the West Central Tribune. Read their story and watch their video here.