Lake Region State College Aiming For Spring Construction of Wind Turbine

• Wind Turbine

LRSC officials hope to start construction on their very own wind turbine by spring.

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DEVILS LAKE (WDAZ-TV) - Lake Region State College is trying to be more green and upgrade its tech coursework at the same time.

Leaders there plan to do that by installing a wind turbine that could power the whole college, plus a little more.

The college has been looking into getting a wind tower installed for six years now and they are hoping construction can start next spring.

"We're working on the FAA application, the PSC application and we just advertised for engineering service," LRSC vice president Doug Darling said.

He's been working on this project for awhile.

"Several of these things that we've had in the works for months are with other agencies are not done yet and they're past the date when we were told they would be done," Darling said.

But getting approval to set up one wind turbine for a college is new for the Public Service Commission.

"We don't know how long the process is because they've never done it before," Darling said.

Wind technician instructors say all that hard work is going to be worth it.

"When the day comes that we get our tower erected we'll be able to take for example these skills bring them out to the tower and they can have a real world application of these skills. It'll be a huge benefit for the program," head of wind instruction Jay Johnson said.

"If we want really good technicians we need to ramp up that time a little bit in having our own will allow us to do that," Darling said.

Along with better training for students the tower has another benefit

"Generate our own power for the campus using green energy. We've always wanted to be more of a green campus," Darling said.

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