Energy Resources

Day 1:  The first day of the class we met at the Idaho Falls Museum and introduced ourselves.  We then loaded up into a van and went to Invenergy's wind powered turbine location.  They have 43 turbines that generate 1.5 Megawatts of power each.  They are capable of generating enough power for 400 homes for each turbine.  The towers are 80 meters tall, the rotors are 122 feet in length for each.  The nacelle is 50 tons and each blade is 7 tons.  They have 7 employees.

The person giving the tour did not seem like he was thrilled we were there and simple read off facts off a sheet of paper. 

After that we went back to the Museum and talked about various types of power generation.  We learned that Idaho gets 86% of our power from hydro projects and 12% from natural gas.  There are 109 hydro projects in Idaho.  The Ada county landfill generated enough power for 24,000 houses simply by burning gasses from their capped land fill.

We then ate lunch and went to the Idaho Falls Power Plant and was given a tour by Doug.  He was WAY better than the Invenergy guy.  He was thrilled that we were there and spend a lot of time explaining things.  See the pictures below and their descriptions.

The plant took 3 years to build and was finished in 1988, 30% of Idaho Falls gets their power from this, and two other plants.  This plant is a 24 megawatt plant and the other two are only 1.5 MW plants.

Day 2:  No pictures today.  We went to the INL and went on a tour of the MFC (Materials Fuel Complex).  800 people work there and one interesting fact is that the space batteries used in the probe going to Pluto was built here.  We say the building that used to house the Zero Power Physics Reactor and then went on a tour of EBR-2 which was a breeder reactor that made more fuel than it used.  It was shut down in 1994.  We were given a tour of the control room, as well as the generator used to produce electricity, and the room were the manipulator arms are located.  The glass windows were 5 feet thick.

After the tour, we had lunch and did an activity on wind, and then went to the INL Willow Creek Facility.  We talked about renewable fuels such as Ethenol.  The presenter also presented at the GNEP conference I went to last October in Boise.  Last year 15% of our corn grown in the USA was converted into ethenol.

There was a lot of information that I will use in the Social Studies class I teach.  There were lots of handouts given on top of the information given to us.  This was a really fun class.

Click on the pictures to load the full sized image.

Entrance to the facility

Front of the dam

Power distribution station

Junk Rake

Junk Rake

Lid over the generator

Looking toward the spillway

Display board

Looking down the stair way

Mechanical room

Mech room

Mech room

Mech room

Stairs leading to the impeller room

Impeller room door

Feeling the door with water behind it

Door leading to the room under the impeller (underwater)

Turbin itself

HUGE oil tank

Diagram of the generator

Generator specs

Lid over the generator

Tools!

Down the stairs to the shaft of the generator

The shaft!

Control arms for the water inlet

Big ram (1 of 2) that control the control arms

Mech area

Stairs to the top of the generator

Stator - White towels are absorbing oil

Stator

Porthole into the stator

Oil tank (view from top)

Power line box going from generator to grid

Control panel

Control panel

Dewatering room - these pumps remove water from the turbin when no water is going into it

Ladder leading to the bottom of the turbin

Another panel

Door into the generator

Water discharge area

Pelican in the discharge area

Junk in the water

Class members

Top of the building

Security camera

Spillway

Big dead fish in the water