Snohomish PUD Microgrid Education

This workshop, funded through BPA in partnership with Snohomish PUD, was an effort to reach teachers in the vicinity of the new Arlington Microgrid Project, completed by the utility in 2019. This microgrid is intended to serve as an educational tool for the surrounding area, having an educational center scheduled to be completed in 2020 to allow for site visits by the general public.  This two-day engagement took place on July 25 and 26, 2019, reaching 20 teachers from 14 different schools.

On day one, teachers focused primarily on acquiring content background, engaging in a series of hands-on activities that touched on the topics of energy transformations, electricity fundamentals, simple circuitry, basic grid dynamics, vehicle design, and grid resiliency. Throughout the day, teachers were separated by grade level with differentiated topics intended to reach their appropriate NGSS standards.

On day two, teachers combined the knowledge they had acquired in order to take a systems-thinking approach toward looking at grid dynamics. They spent the morning utilizing hands-on tools to model grid concepts such as blackouts, increasing resiliency, meeting RPS goals, and incorporating storage. Following this work, they engaged with their professional learning communities to plan their next steps in incorporating tools from the workshop in their long-term plans.  Teachers left this workshop with access to regional science kits of materials and the option to receive reimbursement for using buses for field trips to the future educational center at the microgrid.