Deer Lakes Middle School students win 'Powering Pittsburgh' competition

Four Deer Lakes Middle School students are renewable energy champions.

Students Natalie Shaffer, Elizabeth Strang, Jillian Beiber and Lia DeForce-Petersen placed first in the middle school division of Powering Pittsburgh, a competition that encourages students to come up with alternative ways to generate power in the city of Pittsburgh or Heinz Field.

They’re proud of their accomplishment.

“I thought our project was really good,” DeForce-Petersen said. “I thought we had a good chance of winning.”

There were two rounds of the competition. The first was in October. The finals were held Tuesday at Heinz Field.

That’s where the girls came in first.

“This whole experience has been amazing,” said Tammy McQueen, a K-8 gifted support teacher who advised them on the project.

The girls created a scale model of an underground biomass electric generation plant to power up the Steel City. Biomass is organic material, like food waste, that can be used to generate energy.

They said Pittsburgh generates a lot of food waste, which they discovered through research. An example is the University of Pittsburgh’s Market Central dining hub, which they said wastes 1,000 pounds of food each day.

“The United States wastes 30 to 40% of edible food supply every year,” Strang said.

The girls, seventh- and eighth-graders, crafted the underground plant model, which demonstrates how the energy generation would work.

It burns compressed, dried-out food scraps. As those scraps burn, they heat up water to create steam, which powers a turbine connected to a generator.

The girls said the plant could be built in Sewickley, on 28.5 acres of land zoned for industrial purposes. The property is located on a hill, which would give them the ability to dig under the hill and put the plant underground.

Because the plant would be underground, there wouldn’t be any smell of pollution from the burning food. The trees would take in the released carbon and turn it into oxygen.

“We could dig underneath and maintain that ecosystem above it, and it’s right next to the Ohio River, meaning we could use the water for that, too,” Strang said.

McQueen said the girls approached her about doing a project at the beginning of the school year, and she gave them a list of projects that included Powering Pittsburgh.

It was completed as an extracurricular activity.

The students began working on their project in September.

McQueen said she was confident they would get it done regardless of the time crunch.

“They just have such a great work ethic,” McQueen said. “They’re truly interested in making the world a better place with this kind of power technology, energy. Clean energy.”