Brandon Students Take Action on Energy

Note from Marcia Mayo:  Morris Brandon Elementary School is an International Baccalaureate School.  Fifth Graders in an IB school must take part in Exhibition as a culmination of their Primary Years Programme.  Below you will find a blog posting from four students in Mr. DeCarlo's class.  The topic for their exhibition study was Hydroelectricity  as part of a larger grade-level study on Energy.  Please feel free to make comments on their Action statement, but remember that they are kids.

We’re fifth graders at Morris Brandon Elementary. We are doing an I.B. Exhibition project for the end of the year. We have endured days of researching, planning, and conducting. All in all our project must have an oral part, a written part, and a visual part, plus an action plan. Our action plan was to make a blog and a brochure. This is our blog.

Fossil fuels have been around for thousands of years. The Hopi Indians used coal in the 1300s for cooking, heating, and even to bake pottery. In 1880, coal was used first used for electricity in homes and factories, but coal and all the other fossil fuels (natural gas and oil) aren’t the only energy sources. There are others, for example, solar power and wind power, but a more developed resource is hydroelectricity.

Hydroelectricity doesn’t produce carbon dioxide like fossil fuels, and its storage is clean and safe. Hydroelectric power has many advantages over fossil fuels, including that it can be generated constantly.  Still, not everything is perfect, dams are expensive and it is hard to find a good place to build a dam.

The Hoover Dam cost $690,000,000 in today’s money. Yet, a fossil fuel plant would probably cost about $975,000,000. There are also prices for producing the energy .Hydroelectricity costs under 90 cents per kilowatt-hour (KWH). One barrel of oil costs $0.05 per KWH, one cubic foot of gas costs $0.03 per KWH, and one ton of coal costs $0.006 per KWH.

Hydroelectricity is a very dependable and reliable resource. We know that the world will never stop using fossil fuels, but we hope to use hydroelectricity as much as we are using fossil fuels now.