New England Public Radio

Not An Ordinary Class: Women And Chainsaws In The Berkshires

Curious adults — with enough time and money — have seemingly endless opportunities to gain new skills every day. In the Berkshires, a small group gathered for a class on chainsaws offered by the Trustees of Reservations — specifically for women.

Instructor and arborist Melissa LeVangie knows from her own experience in the trees in the Northeast that women are well in the minority when it comes to using chainsaws.

We are so minuscule, in terms of a large population of who uses this tool,” LeVangie said. “It’s sad but true. “

A demonstration at a chainsaw class in the Berkshires. (Carrie Healy for NEPR)

Even preparing a PowerPoint presentation for the class, LeVangie had a hard time finding appropriate pictures.

Chainsaws, and their users, have changed. New chainsaws have technology and safety features that helped reassure many of the women in the class.

“[There are] some kinds of equipment I’m perfectly comfortable with, but chainsaws — I had little to no experience with them,” said Carol Terry of Lee, Massachusetts..

“When I would watch other people with chainsaws, someone would say, ‘This is the way that I do it,’ and someone else would say, ‘Well, this is the way that I do it,'” said Liz Allen of Caanan, Connecticut. “And I wanted to learn the right way, so that I wouldn’t get any bad habits or have any accidents.”

One universal frustration that women and men all have to overcome? Starting the chainsaw. At the class, there was lots of laughing, and a joke that maybe an electric chainsaw would be the better option.

Ana Maria Spagna wishes there was a class like that when she got started. She knows a thing or two about chainsaws. Spagna, who wrote an essay for the book “From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines,” used a chainsaw as a trail crew member for the National Park Service in the Northern Cascades in Washington state.

Spagna said that over her fifteen years operating chainsaws, gender wasn’t usually a big deal for her.

“When I would go to the shop to pick up parts, the guys at the shop would be sort of delighted to have a young woman come in who obviously knew the tool and knew how to speak the language,” she said. “And — on occasion — they’d even say things like, ‘We wish more gals would come in.'”

In her essay, Spagna wrote about her relationship with her chainsaw — and how it’s a hard tool for both women and men:

Even if you’ve never run a saw, you can hear when someone is forcing the issue, fighting the wood, revving past the time for an undercut. The grain is tightening and the sawyer doesn’t know enough, or is not paying enough attention, to pull out the bar and saw upwards to meet the downward cut. It’s rare to cut in only only direction and make it work.”

“There’s an awful lot about running a chainsaw that can be a metaphor for life,” Spagna said.

Chainsaws used during a class in Sheffield, Mass.
Chainsaws used during a class in Sheffield, Mass.  (Carrie Healy for NEPR)

Months after the chainsaw class in the Berkshires, Pam Rooney of Amherst, Massachusetts, said her skills have come in handy.

“When my neighbor’s limb broke off…we were able to go clean it up for her. And [we] also brought into service our wood splitter to help a neighbor and we spent an afternoon splitting up wood for them,” Rooney said. “We’ll keep the skills sharpened and the saws sharpened.”

Rooney and her husband also own land in Southern New Hampshire covered in beech, maple, hemlock and oak trees.  That’s where, she said, she does her more serious chainsawing.

 

 

Tesla Battery Project Seeks To Turn Vermonters’ Homes Into Tiny Power Plants

NEW ENGLAND NEWS COLLABORATIVE

As our reliance on solar and wind energy grows, so does the challenge of reliability: The wind and sun can’t be turned on and off whenever people need electricity. One part of the solution is energy storage.

That’s why Vermont’s largest utility, Green Mountain Power, is piloting a new project: It’s sold 500 Tesla home batteries to customers, both for the homeowner’s private use, and for the utility to draw on as a source of electricity.

Green Mountain Power is the first utility in the country to pilot the Tesla Powerwall battery in this way.

Both the utility and Tesla are betting that this could be the way of the future, as we increasingly rely on disparate power sources in fields and homes — and not on massive centralized power plants.

On a recent sunny morning, homeowner Miguel Orantes had a sleek gleaming white Powerwall installed in his rustic basement in Bellows Falls, Vermont.

“It’s going to be a great back-up system,” Orantes says. “So when power goes out, obviously there are some key things I’d like to keep going, like the alarm system, medical alert, the hot water heater if possible, obviously the food, just in order to to bridge the gap between the outage and whenever the power gets set back again.”

The battery itself stores about 6.4 kilowatt hours of energy, which could power the bare-bones needs of an average home for about six hours. It’s not meant to be relied on as a back-up generator that could power a home for days, but for Orantes, who lives downtown, it should be plenty to meet his needs.

He had thought about getting a generator before, but didn’t want to keep diesel or gasoline around and deal with maintenance in the winter.

The battery and the inverter combined cost $6,500, not including installation. But Orantes has opted to pay monthly installments of $37.50 for 10 years — a total of $4,500. The price is reduced for homeowners who to allow Green Mountain Power to pull power from the battery.

For Orantes, it’s not just a luxury item. Orantes is disabled and walks with a cane. His doctors recommended he have some kind of power backup for potential outages so his medical alert system would still work.

“My fear has been, what if I fall and there’s no one around?” he says.

The installation of the lithium-ion battery – the same technology that’s in cell phones and laptops — takes all day. It involves hanging the 350-pound battery and an inverter, which is critical because it converts AC electricity from the grid into DC to be stored in the battery, and vice versa.

A virtual power plant

Right now, Orantes is charging his battery from the grid, but others who are buying Tesla Powerwall batteries are charging them from their rooftop solar arrays.

For Green Mountain Power that potential is the crux of this project — and the future of the grid.

When these 500 batteries have been installed in basements scattered across Vermont, they will act as individual sources of power, sort of like a virtual power plant made up of lots of tiny energy generators all connected to the grid.

“It is a system: You’re essentially taking what used to be a couple [of] big plants and power flowing down to homes — to now, thousands and thousands of points out on grid that all need to be choreographed together,” says Josh Castonguay, the chief innovation executive at Green Mountain Power.

That choreography needs to take into account many factors, including whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — or how much electricity consumers are using at peak times, like when everyone gets home from work and starts turning on appliances.

Evolving to a grassroots power system

All this information needs to be calculated every minute to determine if the batteries should be charging from the sun or the grid — or sending out energy to meet peak consumer demand.

Castonguay says this pilot project will be a way to test and refine that complex algorithm.

“If the customer chooses the option where they’re sharing access, when a peak time comes we can have it scheduled to say, ‘OK, start discharging between this hour and this hour,’” says Castonguay. “And then refill it right back up and have it available for the customer in case of an outage.”

The goal is to test the system for some future day when there could be enough storage devices on the grid that they could be relied on to cover peak electricity demand.

Handling more unpredictable electricity demand

Battery storage is vital for utilities looking to rely on solar energy even when the sun isn’t shining.

But storage is also increasingly important because as the amount of solar being built in Vermont has skyrocketed, customers’ energy use has become more variable and unpredictable.

For example, people might not need to draw electricity from the grid as much during sunny times, but if a cloud passes over, demand could shoot back up.

“You have solar and wind being installed, and in many cases these are a new type of power plants, but they’re not controllable, in the sense that you can’t ramp up and down solar or wind as you want,” says Mads Almassalkhi, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Vermont.

“So they’re not as well-behaved as our old-school traditional power plants.”

Almassalkhi says when you couple that with the fact that today’s electricity demands are more variable and change faster from minute-to-minute, “what that means is you have these slow generators that have to track this much faster moving [demand.] So this means … you have to have power plants sitting by, waiting basically to ramp up and down very quickly.”

That’s where utilities traditionally rely on natural gas plants. But batteries are also quite capable of ramping up and down quickly.

“One of the biggest challenges is intelligently coordinating hundreds, thousands [someday] of Powerwalls,” he says.“If we can regulate this in smart way, we can cancel out the variability that’s introduced from renewable energy.”

So far, Green Mountain Power has only installed about 10 Tesla Powerwalls in customers’ homes. But once all 500 are hooked up to the electrical grid, the utility will have a new source of power generation: The basement batteries will add up to about 1 megawatt of power.

That doesn’t seem like much when compared to the fact that in peak use times the whole state of Vermont demands over 700 megawatts. But every power source counts.

And there’s already nearly 150 megawatts of solar cranking in Vermont — enough to power more than 24,000 homes. So if utilities had more battery storage, all those basement battery packs could be a significant source of power.

Even Homemade Food May Have Combat-Ready Origins

With kids headed back to school soon, parents’ thoughts may turn to the packing of imperishable and durable lunches and snacks. Think: energy bars and drink boxes. Many common lunchbox foods were developed in military labs, including a big one in Massachusetts, says food writer Anastasia Marx de Salcedo. Her book is called “The Combat-Ready Kitchen.”

Click the audio player above to hear her interview with New England Public Radio’s Carrie Healy.

City Seeking Tech: Can Springfield Create A Technology Sector?

Places like San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston are established hubs of tech giants and start-up companies. A growing number of smaller cities and regions want a piece of the action, including the Pioneer Valley. A Springfield-based organization called Tech Foundry has an ambitious mission: to “turn western Massachusetts into the technology capital of the Northeast.” But how? I asked the creator of Tech Foundry, Delcie Bean.

“This is an area that could be thriving and succeeding, but when we looked at why it wasn’t, one of the critical pieces that’s missing is a skilled workforce, Bean says, “and it’s very hard to convince a company to locate here, or to re-locate here, or even to grow here without a strong, skilled workforce.”

So Bean wants to train high school students in coding and other computer skills. The organization started with 25 kids last summer. It’s housed in an office building in downtown Springfield in a space that mimics the trendy offices of tech companies like Google.

“You’ve got the ping-pong table, you’ve got the Wii that they can play with. So it gave them a chance to interact with each other, to bond, but also just to take a break and have fun.”

Tech Foundry students are also given professional clothes to wear at all times. And the organization provides meals to the students, many of whom come from lower-income families. Bean says the goal is to get the students jobs in IT at local companies, or into a community college program with the promise of a job later.

“In every case it’s a major step forward toward an IT career in the Valley,” Bean says.

There’s also that bigger goal for Delcie Bean – to build up a tech center in the Pioneer Valley, and attract major tech companies to Springfield. Bean himself owns an IT firm based in Hadley, and he has a software distribution startup called Waterdog based in Springfield. Separately, there’s a video game company that was recruited to the city from Amherst last year.

Bean says Springfield has the racial and ethnic diversity that many companies are looking for.

“If you look at 75 percent of the IT employees that exist in this country, they’re white males,” Bean says. “So oftentimes big tech companies have to open up offices in other markets in order to get that diversity.”

Another attraction: the relatively low cost of living, though that’s a benefit talked up by other small metro areas. Journalist James Fallows of The Atlantic has traveled around the country for the last two years looking at how cities are adapting to the modern economy. Fallows says the vision for Springfield and the Valley espoused by Delcie Bean has some traits of successful tech turnarounds he’s seen elsewhere.

“In almost every tale of urban redevelopment or tech sector spread, people will point back to a person or two or three people who said, ‘yeah, we’re going to make this happen,’ ” Fallows says.

The other essential ingredients are good vocational training programs, and a supportive local government, Fallows says. Springfield has that. The city’s Mayor, Domenic Sarno, is a big booster of redeveloping the downtown, and he’s visited Tech Foundry.

In another part of the Pioneer Valley, some of the big companies that Delcie Bean wants to attract were represented at a conference at UMass Amherst this spring. It was the launch of the school’s Big Data Center. Microsoft’s Jennifer Chays is based in Kendall Square – the tech hub in Cambridge. She says the company plans to give the school up to $500,000 worth of cloud computing resources per year.

“We’re very excited that UMass is training the next generation of data scientists, especially for Massachusetts,” Chays says.

But I asked Chays if Microsoft would locate jobs in this part of the state.

“At the moment, I don’t think we’re planning an R&D center in the Amherst area, but it’s not very far to Kendall Square,” Chays says.

Steve Vintner works for Google, and is UMass graduate. So what about you, Google? Any plans to open an office in western Mass.?

“I don’t think Google has any specific plans, but just in terms of seeing how this area has grown over the last twenty years, it’s phenomenal, so I think there’s going to be a bright future,” says Vintner.

Even if the efforts to bring Silicon Valley to the Pioneer Valley get more traction, journalist James Fallows says it takes some time to create a regional tech hub.

“You can think of the way that what we now call the Research Triangle of North Carolina, thirty years ago people said those terms with air quotes around them, now it’s a bonafide research triangle,” Fallows says. “The idea of having regional, non-big city tech hubs is consistent with what’s happened over the years.”

Delcie Bean says he’ll be ready to market the city and workforce of Springfield to big tech companies in less than two years. And he does already have the ping-pong table.