Students look to the moon for future energy source

When a student jokingly recommended lunar power as an alternative source of energy, his classmates laughed. The teacher, Tom Brett, however, was intrigued. “Prove it,” he said.

Brett was available at Frostburg State University Wednesday, April 20, 2011, as part of the campus wide Earth Week celebration. Set up in the Lane University Center lobby, he presented the concept of tidal energy generation. Brett and this team of middle school students from St. Peter’s Middle School in Waldorf, Maryland were challenged to research and develop an alternative energy source. The project was part of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) initiative lead by Brett. The opportunity to work on the project was offered and six students, four boys and two girls, volunteered for the job. “The kids recognized the importance of an education,” Brett said proudly. After considering wind and solar power, the students discovered that the moon could actually be a possible option in the future through the use of tides. “What these kids are worried about is in twenty years, will they have resources?” Brett explained. While natural gas and coal are limited, tidal generators do not consume natural resources. “This is really retro if you think about it because when we first started generating electricity, all we used was hydroelectric power,” Brett stated.

The model displayed Wednesday as part of the Prototype of Tidal Electricity Generation display demonstrated the way in which the blades would generate power and then send it to be stored nearby. Brett explained that the Tidal Generator could be used in rivers, bays, and oceans. “You could put this in the Potomac River in Cumberland and it wouldn’t need tides to generate electricity because there is so much current,” he said. A separate building, a monitoring station, would be used to check the performance of the propellers. The turbines would be under the surface so they would not interfere with navigation or be an eyesore, which has been a criticism of wind turbines. The students researched other tidal prototypes and made a few adjustments to their own model including changing the traditional paddle system to a series of propellers. “The idea isn’t new, just underused,” Brett explained. In December, the team submitted their project in a competition and won first place for their excellent research.