Oakesdale grade school students get first-hand look at wind turbines

The wind turbine could no longer fit in between Tyler Bober’s fingers. So the Oakesdale Elementary student stretched his arms like an alligator mouth to capture the size of the nearing tower.

Bober was one of roughly two dozen first through fourth grade students who toured the Palouse Wind farm on Naff Ridge last Thursday, Oct. 4.

There, they learned one of the wind farm’s turbines could supply more than enough electricity to power every household in Oakesdale; that each tower has a ladder with 250 rungs inside, and that the workers do not live in the trailers at the project’s Baird Road headquarters.

Ben Fairbanks, western region business development manager for Palouse Wind’s parent company First Wind, explained to the students how warm air rising from the Columbia Basin is replaced by cold air sinking out of the mountains of Idaho to create the winds used to spin the Palouse Wind turbines.

Second grader William Gladwill saw the wind farm tour as an excuse to play with giant numbers.

“If each tower is worth about $2 million, and there are 58 towers,” he thought as he scratched numbers across his paper trying to manipulate numbers. “Then... how many zeroes are there in a million?”

Six. Which makes for $116 million worth of towers on the wind farm site, Gladwill figured out.

The big numbers got bigger.

Each turbine has three blades. Ladders inside each tower have 250 rungs. The towers are 400 feet tall. Inside the bus touring the wind farm, students proposed multyiplying each of those numbers by 58.

“We’ll work on that when we get back to school,” promised Mrs. Shari Ross.

The wind farm will soon be completed, with two of the five strands of turbines already spinning in the wind and supplying power to Avista.

Fairbanks said, as of last week, workers had logged 152,000 hours of labor on the project.