Rankin to build wind turbine

While students revel in their spring break, work will begin Thursday on erecting a 100-foot-tall wind turbine at Rankin School in South Pekin as the foundation for the monopole will be dug and poured.

Rankin Community School District 98 received a grant of up to $40,000 from the Illinois Clean Energy Foundation, according to District Superintendent Steve Johnson, to install a wind turbine to use as an educational tool.

“We’re not going to be installing it for the purpose of saving energy,” Johnson said. “We’re going to be using it as an educational tool for our students. We have some software that will feed the energy data from the turbine into the classrooms so our students can learn about clean energy and energy produced by the wind.

“We’re excited about it — we’re looking forward to it. It should create enough energy to light about 40 bulbs, so (we) won’t really see much savings from it.”

According to the grant application documents, the district will pay at least 10 percent of the installation costs, which will come from the building and maintenance budget.

Windy City Green Power, a Palatine-based firm, is helping coordinate the installation efforts, Johnson said.

Having recently received the go-ahead from the Tazewell County Regional Office of Education, the digging for the foundation is set to begin at 8 a.m. and finish at about noon Thursday, Johnson said.

The Rankin School District has already committed to alternative energy education, and the turbine should make its offerings more comprehensive.

The school already has a solar panel system that is used for educational purposes. Information about the power output of the panels is streamed to a website — available through a link on the district’s website — where students can view the effect the weather has on the panels’ output.

According to the district’s grant application, math and science teachers for the district’s junior high school are applying for a grant from the Illinois Wind Schools program for resources to develop a curriculum centered around the wind turbine, with topics including “fundamentals of wind energy, principles of wind turbine operation and ideas for integrating wind energy into the existing curriculum.”

The district also said in the grant application that it would work with the parents’ organization to host a “Wind Celebration Event” to raise community awareness about the importance of the turbine.

 Dan Hayden with Capitol Power says “There was a very low risk of the fire spreading on the ground and at that point we realized there was not much they could do expect let it burn itself out.”

It was the first fire involving a functioning wind turbine in Ontario, and Dave Hemingway with Central Huron Against Turbines is among those who are concerned.

“The local municipalities don’t have either high-level rescue capabilities, as high as these turbines are, or they don’t have any fire equipment to put out a fire like this. Then you also wonder how far pieces off the turbine will travel in the wind.”

A crane will be brought in to remove the destroyed nacelle and blades as soon as possible, then a decision will have to be made about whether the burned-out parts can be replaced.