This past week in class we all traveled to the Museum of Science (MOS) to see some examples of renewable/green energy for our final projects.  Being a huge fan of the MOS, I was really excited to check out this exhibit.

While we were there, we all looked at a display of how a wind turbine works.  I was really impressed by how the staff had two small gears behind plexiglass that you could turn and imitate the turbine working.  For example, I am the wind and I’m turning the blades of the turbine and we were able to see these gears move and how much energy would be created because of it.  Another really cool part of the exhibit was this touch-screen computer where you could look up on a map of Massachusetts where all of the wind turbines are, any coal factories, and basically where all renewable and non-renewable energy producers were located within the state.  It was interesting to see how close some of these places were to my home.

My favorite piece of the exhibit was this machine that had a gauge that went from green (good) to red (environmentally bad) whenever you put these magnetic disks on it.  We were able to place the disks in slots labeled “nuclear energy,” “solar energy,” and “coal powered energy,” etc., and this machine would move the gauge to either good or bad.  This machine was supposed to represent the environmental impacts that would ensue if these sources of energy were running Boston.  I really liked this one because we were able to see how good or bad each option was and how it would effect the city.

Towards the end, Tom Vales was showing a few of us the steam powered machine towards the back of the exhibit near the model trains and cars were.  He was explaining to us how much power this machine would have created and how dangerous they were back in the day.  I really enjoyed this talk with Tom because he is a treasure trove of knowledge and it was interesting to imagine this steam powered machine on at full blast.