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Moscow, Vermont, is known mostly as a place motorists drive through on their way north to Stowe village and the Stowe Mountain Resort. Like many small Vermont communities, Moscow (it is officially an unincorporated village, so it has no central government) once boasted a vital woodworking industry powered by a hydro dam on the Little River.

The mill building stopped generating power when tropical storm Irene hit in 2011—the dam’s sluiceway was inundated with sediment stirred up by the storm. The village subsequently lost its post office, and the Moscow general store closed in 2017. But today, things are looking up in Moscow through the contributions of visionary citizens, the local utility company, and several classes of �պ����� students who have used the site as a laboratory for innovation over the past two years.

Students from �պ����� classes in engineering, historic preservation and environmental science have all helped reimagine Moscow as a model for other small utilities to bolster resilience of the local electric grid and adopt renewable energy.

“Creating a fully carbonless microgrid will allow us to continue investing in renewable energy,” said Michael Lazorchak, manager of regulatory affairs for Stowe Electric, which bought the property in 2017. “If there’s an outage or some disruption to the system, and we can power the infrastructure solely from this microgrid. Then you don’t have to pull fossil fuels from the Vermont Electric Power Company system.”

The vision is inspiring not just for the students and local residents. Last month, the American Public Power Association (APPA) presented the Energy Innovator Award to Stowe Electric (PDF) for its ongoing partnership with �պ�����. The award “honors utilities that have developed or applied creative techniques and technologies to improve the efficient delivery of energy services in their communities,” according to the APPA citation.

“We want to develop the mill and hydro power site into a community center,” Lazorchak said. “It’s an ambitious vision given the small, steep parcel of land we have. The ideas developed by the students have been really important in our whole planning process.”

Real Projects

For students, the work represented an opportunity to apply their learning to a real-world project. Liza Mclatchy ’23 served as project leader for a group of students charged with improving pedestrian and vehicle traffic in and around the two-acre site. The work was especially complex because proposed changes required collaboration with an adjoining property owner, Ethan Carlson, who has plans to establish a general store in his building.

“Ethan and Michael invited us to optimize the  combined properties by keeping the common interest of all the partners in mind, so we were all on the same page,” Mclatchy explained. “One priority was to make truck turnarounds safer. The site gets deliveries almost every day and trucks have to back onto Moscow Road and into traffic to turn around. It was a real safety issue as well as a space analysis challenge.”

Mclatchy and her team, including fellow seniors Ben Ashby, Alexandra Greer and Angus Nilgitsalanont, came up with a solution that includes more parking for Stowe Electric and customers of the new store, while improving traffic flow. The group's plans illustrate how terraces and retaining walls could maximize the site’s footprint.

John Lens, professor of practice and instructor for the CE175 Capstone Design course, says his students work on projects like this every year, improving local communities while building students’ practical experience.

“There’s a strong service-learning component to the course,” Lens explains. “Our students work with clients who are looking for real design solutions. At the same time, students get a taste of what it’s like to work on a team, and that can be the most rewarding part of engineering work.”

Three other groups of engineering students have been on site since the fall ’21 semester to do structural analysis and design on the historic mill building, known as Seaver’s Sawmill. Stowe Electric wants to judge the feasibility of installing solar arrays on the roof while maintaining the building’s historic integrity, and students had to evaluate the building’s load capacity for the added weight while considering the stone foundations and timber framing.

They leaned heavily on a study recently completed by �պ����� Historic Preservation graduate student Marissa Gibbs G '21, who concluded the building represents an excellent example of an early 19th century Vermont mill building. Stowe Electric envisions renovating it as a visitor center, where members of the public can learn about the past, present and clean energy future of the mill.

Other groups of engineering students designed a new intake area for re-installing the hydro-electric power plant, devised solutions to minimize sediment build-up behind the dam, and evaluate the structural capacity to reuse a second building on the property which could be leased to local tenants—and possibly serve as office space for future �պ����� students. 

Riverbank Restoration

While student engineers evaluated the built infrastructure on the site, students from Professor Laura Edling’s Environmental Problem-Solving course (NR 206) created plans for stabilizing the riverbank, combating invasives like Japanese knotweed, and identifying locations for a recreational trail and stairway to the river.

Ben Reinwald '23 participated in class. The group decided to use fascines, long bundles of dormant branch cuttings bound together, as a solution for preventing erosion. The staked fascines will eventually root and stabilize the slopes. They also planted fast-growing black willows, an ideal native plant for restoring shorelines to a natural state.

“Our group was building off another project from the previous semester,” Reinwald said. “That class collected a lot of elevation measurements on that helped Stowe Electric get a VTUCF (Vermont Urban & Community Forestry Program) grant. We used money from that grant to build this erosion mitigation plan.”

The work represents a model of continuity as each successive class builds on the work done by their student predecessors.

Wendy Crosier is a Clean Energy Innovation Fellow at U.S. Department of Energy and one of several Stowe Electric consultants, including past �պ����� students who are now professional engineers including Lindsay George and Brian Cote, who have supported the Stowe/�պ����� partnership.

“I think it would be hard to find a project where students from so many different disciplines are building on each other’s work,” she said. “Everything is fresh for them, and they bring good ideas and infectious enthusiasm to the whole project.”

Jackie Pratt, general manager for Stowe Electric, says the �պ����� partnership was key to helping the utility leverage national attention and money to the project. To date the utility has secured in several grants including a congressional earmark of $1.2 million from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to repair Smith’s Falls Dam. Several other funding proposals in the works.

“The public power model really means our customers are our owners,” explains Pratt. “Their return on investment should include reliable service at fair prices and commitment to the community. There’s a social justice element here, too—we’re planning on pairing the power generation with energy credits for low-income customers. Through commitment to renewable and carbon-free generation and hazard mitigation we’re responding to those needs, and the student projects are contributing to all of that.”