BHS Renewable Fuels instructor Ruth Ahrndt watches as Chrysees Tvedt turns off the ethanol fermenter as students Nicole Giese, Nadine Rooney, Ben Murphy and Kyle Pederson wait to take the mash and distill it into ethanol.
It was around Thanksgiving 2008, when lst Security Bank President Jan Lundebrek called Supt. Lee Westrum to give him a heads up about a possible grant opportunity for Benson High School.
Lundebrek, who serves on the Minnesota Renewable Energy Marketplace (MNREM) board, is a persistent promoter of renewable fuels and the Benson area.
That phone call has led to a collaborate effort between the community, the BHS and the Chippewa Valley Ethanol Company (CVEC) resulting in the local high school having the first, and perhaps only, table-top ethanol production facility in the country.
MNREM was founded with a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration. Its mission is "To develop regional talent and businesses, boost innovation and support the cultivation of new technologies, in order to achieve a competitive advantage in the global economy."
Its focus is training workers, encouraging job creation, and supporting innovation in Minnesota's renewable energy industry.
To accomplish this goal, MNREM has been awarded nearly $4 million in grants to businesses, communities and post-secondary technical schools and colleges in the 36-county region that includes south central, southwest and west central Minnesota.
Lundebrek, who also serves on the board of directors of the Chippewa Valley Ethanol Company, asked why a high school could not apply for the funding for a renewable energy grant to train young people. After all, with its ethanol plant, which also is gasifying biomass for power, and Fibrominn, which burns biomass to produce electricity, Benson is a center of renewable energy innovation and offers employment opportunities to young people, she reasoned.
In early December 2008, Westrum attended a meeting at the Swift County Courthouse about the MNREM grant opportunity. But there was not much time to come up with a program that would fit the grant requirements. The grant was due the first week of January 2009.
"I was thinking about type of a program that we could put together in an application," Westrum said in an interview last Thursday. "Of course, the focus of MNREM is renewable energy with the focus of the grant related to jobs and economic development."
Westrum knew the school already had a relationship with CVEC in that some of its science classes had been out to the plant for tours.
"Matt Larson's organic chemistry class had produced a little ethanol in the lab - real crude stuff," Westrum explained. "When they would go for a tour of CVEC, they would bring it out there to be tested. The kids would be working in teams and would all have a little vial of what they had produced. That was part of where I got the idea..." of how he would approach the grant, he said.
"With the ethanol plant right here in town and the struggle we have in finding jobs for our young people in rural Minnesota, I started putting it all together in my head," Westrum said. "I thought if we had the ethanol equipment, we could make it and test it here ourselves and that would really be a pretty neat deal," Westrum said.
Another piece of the puzzle was linking the classroom to the working world.
That piece fell into place by bringing in BHS's school-to-work program called "Off Campus Work Site" overseen by teacher Doug Manske. Through the program, seniors can earn credits toward graduation by working with an approved employer in the Benson area.
But key to the program's success was a teacher who would take on the class. Westrum approached high school science teacher Ruth Ahrdnt with the idea.
"I was interested," Ahrdnt said. "I've had a particular interest in the development of renewal energies. I've taught environmental sciences and some of those topics come up in that course.
"And yet," she admits, "there was a big learning curve because there were things that I had not necessarily taught before. The other thing was to find a curriculum she could use."
When she told him she thought it would be great to have that kind of equipment to work with, Westrum said, "I thought, 'Let's give it a shot!'"
