The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

From the Yahoo group Alt Power Digest:


Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 15:06:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: Green Bean
Subject: Grad student measures wind power

Newsmaker / Grad student measures wind power as source
of energy for SRU campus

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

By Alisha Hipwell

Heath Gamache has come to understand better than most
the troubling effects of electrical power production,
from acid rain to greenhouse gas emissions

So the Prospect man, who's pursuing a master's degree
in sustainable systems at Slippery Rock University of
Pennsylvania spends a lot of time asking how humans
can have a comfortable life with less environmental impact.

The answer, my friend -- as Bob Dylan would put it --
might be blowing in the wind.

Gamache, 31, is gathering data on the feasibility of
using wind, a clean power source, to generate
electricity for parts of the Slippery Rock campus. He
recently installed a 100-feet meteorological tower
near the university's football stadium to measure wind
velocity for a year.

"For me one of the crux issues for the United States
right now is energy -- energy security, energy
independence and all the environmental damage and
pollution that comes from getting energy the way we do
right now," said Gamache.

If he finds average wind speeds of at least 10 mph
over the 12-month period, a wind turbine could be installed to produce electricity for Harmony House,
located at the university's Robert A. McCoskey Center
for Sustainable Systems Education and Research.

Wind speeds in the 15 to 25 mph range would be
sufficient for a wind farm that could supply power for
the whole region.

Gamache said the university campus is one of the
highest points in Butler County, so he expects to get
good results on wind readings.

"My guess is we could make a fairly large dent in
power usage," he said.

The tower has two anemometers to measure wind speed
and a vane to track its direction. The data is logged
onto microchips and is downloaded onto a laptop
computer for analysis.

Gamache grew up in Northfield, Mass., in the Berkshire
mountains region. His parents introduced him to
hiking, camping and other outdoor activities, and
those early experiences made a lasting impression.

"I am like many other people in the field in that, as
a child, I had the opportunity to be in a place where
the wonder and beauty of nature was shared with me by
someone I cared about -- in my case my parents," he
said.

As he grew older, Gamache's love of the outdoors,
coupled with his Christian faith, grew into a deep
desire to understand and protect the natural world.

"For me, personally, it went beyond just wanting to be
in nature and enjoy the outdoors for recreation to
wanting to understand it more from a scientific
perspective but even more so, in my case, from a
stewardship perspective," he said.

Still, it took Gamache time to find his niche. He
earned a degree in corporate communications from
Ithaca College in New York and briefly worked in the
advertising and graphic design field.

"I didn't like the atmosphere. I'd rather be outdoors
communicating one on one," he said.

So Gamache got out of the field and worked as a
program director for a camp in Iowa, but that job
didn't get to the heart of what he loved: teaching
others about the environment.

So when he saw a posting for the position of assistant
director of environmental education for Camp
Lutherlyn, he jumped at the opportunity. He took the
position in 1997 and moved into the Connoquenessing
Township camp's self-sustaining straw bale house,
Terra Dei Homestead. The name is Latin for "God's
earth."

Gamache is at ease at Terra Dei, where modern
convenience and environmental sensitivity have made a
happy marriage.

Freshly harvested mint leaves hang drying from a
picnic pavilion roof at the homestead. A laptop
computer sits on the kitchen table, near a brand new
refrigerator full of vegetables grown in the organic garden.

"It's a modern lifestyle that makes more sense,"
Gamache said.

Gamache would like to see his research -- the
homestead has a wind tower much like the one at the
university -- help Slippery Rock and other
Pennsylvania universities move to the forefront of
wind energy education.

"When planning for the future, you have to plan big,"
he said. "It would be fantastic if five to 10 years
down the road we could see a wind farm that would
power SRU, the whole town."

That might not be so far-fetched. According to the
American Wind Energy Association in Washington, D.C.,
wind energy is the world's fastest-growing energy
source.

Pennsylvania is well down the list of windiest states,
but "we've still got plenty of wind energy to tap
into," Gamache said.

The windmills in Somerset County, visible from the
Pennsylvania Turnpike, produce 2.4 million
kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. That's enough to
power about 240 average homes.

Steven Doherty, an assistant professor and coordinator
in the university's sustainable systems program, said
the cost of electricity generated by wind is dropping
faster than electricity produced by conventional means.

Figure in the cost of environmental damage such as
acid rain caused by conventional generation and,
Doherty said, "it's clear wind is already pretty
competitive." But it's hard for consumers to see that,
because the costs of environmental damage don't show
up on their electric bills.

The wind study isn't Gamache's only environmental
project. At Camp Lutherlyn, Gamache is overseeing work
on a passive treatment system that will revitalize
Semiconon Run, a creek at the camp that is
contaminated with mine drainage.

The camp's director of environmental education, Todd
Garcia-Bish, credited Gamache with writing the grant
that secured funding for the project.

After Gamache finishes his graduate program in 2004,
he would like to take his knowledge of alternative
power sources to other areas of the country

"I'd like to take these ideas and technologies to
developing areas of the United States or abroad to
places desperately in need of energy sources where
they haven't already made disastrous energy choices," he said.