In the spring of 2008, a couple of students from the Cascade Climate Network (cascadeclimate.org) designed and carried out a plan to create summer jobs for students to help with a community supported renewable energy project. Propelled by the Slingshot grant from Focus the Nation and Cliff Bar, and some great student and community member support, the Northwest Institute for Community Energy (NICE) was born. This Institute was designed with two purposes in mind. To create hands-on contextual learning experiences for students through meaningful summer jobs, and to help transition communities into a more sustainable energy infrastructure by moving a community supported renewable energy project forward.
The energy project that was chosen for the NICE was Sunnyside Neighborhood Energy or SunNE for short. SunNE is an effort to create a community owned thermal energy utility that would be based around a K-8th grade environmental school in the Sunnyside Neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. This project would utilize multiple sources of renewable energy to create thermal energy and store it in water. The water would then be distributed throughout 35 square blocks of residential and business property in the Sunnyside Neighborhood. This thermal energy could be used for heating and cooling of buildings as well as for all the typical applications of hot water, and has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of the energy used by the community by 70-80%.
The NICE ended up nothing like what we had imagined when we sat down to design it, however, it was a great success in terms of still reaching the overarching goals of learning and progress. Four students were able to find funding for summer jobs as NICE coordinators and had one of the most powerful learning experiences of their lives. Also, the SunNE was moved forward through production of widespread community support, a SunNE Report, and a weekly meeting working group in the community.
Here is a video we made at one point. Cheers!
