(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Throughout the country, people are planting seeds of innovation, harvesting a bounty of ideas to help care for the only home we have, planet earth.

In the second season of My World Too, discover with our team ideas and sustainability, both new and old from high tech eco innovations to homegrown local solutions.

We'll learn about sustainable trends in transportation, housing, energy, food production, climate change, carbon reduction, resource management, and so much more.

Join our field reporters as they explore eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to My World Too, short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

- All right, what we have last week, seven murders, 11 shootings and seven murders in a weekend.

- We talk about building prisons and building prisons and building prisons.

What we need to invest in is more human capital.

How do we help take care of our people that are here that wanna change their lives?

Everybody doesn't want to be bad and do crime.

I know no kid that grows up and says, I want to be a criminal.

No, we all want to be Superman.

We want to be Superwoman, but we are led in a lot of different paths that change our lives.

So this is a way to help us get back on track and drive our way into the future.

- Well, here we are in the heart of Kansas City.

We're closer to the inner city than the suburbs.

- No, we are in the Inner City Market.

- We're in the Inner City.

Is this is this by plan?

- It is.

We could have put this school anywhere, but we had to put it where people can get to it by bus, taxi, car, train, whatever you need, you can get here.

If we put it somewhere else, we wouldn't make it.

So New Reflections has been around since 2011.

We're actually only one of two black owned trucking schools in the country.

So we are very powerful, I would think in our presence, in the community to help our people grow and get CDL licenses to change their lives and have a sustainable career.

- This is a life changing situation.

This is something that's going build us up and make our families come to a point where we don't have that struggle no more, where we don't have to sit back and wonder where that next meal is gonna come from.

Or if our bills is going get paid.

You know what I'm saying?

- [Man] It's all right brother.

Yeah.

- I'd had my issues here.

I have, but every last one they gave me encouragement and that perseverance, just tell me, boy, keep pushing, keep going.

And I appreciate y'all for that because if it wasn't for that, ain't no telling where I be standing at right now.

- Come one boy, we know we gonna do all this man.

Come the boy.

(all clap) - You know, I seen a need in our community to how to find sustainable jobs or sustainable lives and what industry never stops, and that's trucks, trucks never stop moving, the clothes we wear, the things we hygiene, things we use, everything eventually hits a truck.

So I felt like it would be a great idea to help our community find jobs that they can live and have sustainable lives.

- Basically, I'm from Pakistan.

So I just moved here since 2021 in July, we ended up here because my husband, he thinks that this is more diversity in this school and they are welcoming to everybody, right?

And no matter how many times you didn't clear the test, whatever it is, but they gave you a chance.

So I think this institution is giving people the opportunity to sustain yourself, to sustain your family to be a responsible citizen of this country.

- Well, Dale, tell him to breathe.

Tell him to breathe.

He's tightened there.

- To understand that some of these people may have been either down on their luck or gotten a little trouble with the law and that a lot of the issues are not having opportunity.

- That's a huge part of the situation.

You know, one thing I always say is that everybody's done something, just everybody didn't get caught.

And then some have ways to get out of things, but other people have real challenges and they need to have those barriers removed.

So it could be traffic situations previously incarcerated on probation or parole.

There's a lot of different things that can go on.

So say you have traffic tickets, or you may have things on your license where you didn't know how to deal with them.

We have contracts with the city courts and state courts to help them have those warrants and tickets lifted as long as they're in our program.

So again, it's about removing barriers, but if you don't have money, you don't have a job, how do you get rid of a ticket to start a program and change your life?

So time goes by and it just never happens.

We remove those barriers to make sure that they can move forward into the future.

- If you're around my age group from anywhere from 18 and up, it doesn't matter your age.

You can come here, you can get your certificate and start a whole new life.

You could leave everything that you did in the past in the past, and just begin a new life.

You know, you should be able to take care of your family, your friends, open up doors for other people that you care for.

Everything would just change once you start changing your life step by step, everything would not change overnight.

You have to take small steps that begin to take bigger steps, you know.

- We basically work with the state of Missouri and the state of Kansas, where we work with most of the facilities where we can actually walk people out after their pre-release and they've been previously incarcerated into our program, which is transitional housing, which we house them.

We feed them, we get them training.

We secure their funding dollars for training.

We secure to make sure that they're fed and housed all through their training and job placement.

So that means you're going from the prison walls basically out to a career.

That's the only thing that's gonna reduce recidivism.

It costs about 37 to $40,000 to house a person that's incarcerated, not including medical, not including your food.

That's just housing.

When versus you could spend $6,000 on a program like ours to help them get a CDL license that's gonna change their lives.

So now they don't have to go commit that crime or do whatever they were doing to get themselves in trouble before it removes all those barriers.

- When you have a system who's against you, but you also have people who love their brother and their sister, and so much to where they want to create opportunities, it's no longer that struggle just to survive.

Now we winning, now we living, now, we actually able to each one, you know, teach one.

- If we had more jobs rather than more jails, then we could have an opportunity where individuals could take care of themselves.

- Jobs not jails.

We have ano enough jails.

We need more jobs.

If we create more jobs and build our workforce development, then we can have less crime because people will be at home enjoying the amenities of life and not just committing crime.

So jobs not jail is our slogan and we stick to it, it means a lot to us.

I like to say that we've created a non-traditional workforce, you know, before we were looking at people based off of what they did or what their past or previously incarcerated, instead of now, we're able to look at people for people.

So our placement rate right now is at 96% because we are working with more corporations and larger trucking companies that encourage them to hire our graduates as they come out of school, give them that chance when others may not take advantage of the opportunity, these people and individuals will.

So are at 96%, we're giving a lot of people jobs.

Over the years, we've placed over 1400 students, made them graduates and then now are employed.

That's almost $70 million that has gone back into the economy, real dollars, tax paying dollars that are paying child support, buying houses, cars, a place to live, buying groceries.

You know, they're doing things that they normally wouldn't be able to do before.

So I love what we're doing here at New Reflections.

- New Reflections is a game changer here in our city, we're changing people's lives in a positive way, giving young men and young women hope and inspiration that we're not gonna arrest our way out of this.

- And you know, our show is about sustainability and I've always thought hearing about what you're doing is you're sustaining community.

- If we can't teach our people to fish, if we can't teach our people to take care of themselves, we're always gonna be in this cycle of failure.

We're going to keep building more jails.

We're gonna keep living in poverty, but if you could teach people, show of them a way to have a sustainable life where they're now not making those bad decisions.

They're not doing those same things they normally would do because they have something worth having.

They have something they don't want to lose, restoring hope and sustainability is a very good combination, hope and sustainability to have a good life where you could take care of your family.

- Mark Berg here today he's making lives change for everyone no matter your ethnicity, your background, your troubles that you came from, no matter anything.

As long as you come in here with the attitude that you can, he's gonna help you and push you to make sure that you will, he's gonna turn your can into a will.

That's all he does.

Like it doesn't matter if you come in here with sad, teary eyes, or if you just got outta the prison yesterday, he's gonna make sure that you have a chance to change your life for the better.

- She is ready.

So that is all yours.

- Thank you.

- That is all yours.

- Tell me how you feel.

Tell me how you feeling.

- I feel amazing.

- What are you gonna do with it?

- I'm gonna eat today.

- I'm gonna eat today.

- For like three days.

- She's gonna eat today.

VO: Wind turbines can be seen all throughout the western plains of the united states.

But how will these marvels of modern engineering help usher in a new era of clean energy?

Nick Schmitz treks out to a wind farm to find out which way the wind blows.

- The future's pretty bright.

President Biden has laid out really the boldest climate strategy the United States has ever seen both renewable energy and energy efficiency are going to play a huge role in decarbonizing our economy, starting with the grid, right?

You know, we know we need to integrate more renewable generation onto the grid if we're gonna get there by 2035.

And at the same time, we have to make sure that it's reliable and secure and resilient.

- My name's Mike Derby, I'm the program manager for research development, demonstration and testing for the Wind Energy Technologies Office.

I'm an aerospace engineer by training, I've been with DOE for the past 13 years, but one turbine uses aerodynamic similar to a propeller on an airplane or helicopter rotor.

The aerodynamic force causes the rotor blades to turn that in turns connected to a shaft that turns a generator.

So typically there's either connected directly to a generator or it may go through a pure box to a generator.

- About how much wind do you need in order for a turbine to be generating?

- A wind terminal will start producing power at about three to three and a half meters per second of wind.

And it'll continue to increase how much power it's putting out as you get up to about 11 or 12 meters per second, above that the power doesn't increase.

It just stays flat out to about 25 meters per second.

Above 25 meters per second, the turbine will turn itself off to protect itself from being overloaded.

- So you have to have a fair amount of wind to really be generating at full capacity?

- At full capacity, it does take a fair amount of wind.

- How clean is wind power?

If you're comparing it to, you know, a fossil fuel burning power plant.

- So a wind turbine has several advantages with regards to clean energy.

So there's no emissions, right?

There's no greenhouse gases that are being produced, it doesn't consume any water in the generation of the electricity.

So these attributes compared to say, a fossil fuel generation are really beneficial, right?

You still have end of life issues with wind turbine.

So we still need to recycle them.

90% of a wind turbines are recycled today, but there's still a few things that we need to work on.

Particularly, the wind turbine blades, those are starting to be recycled and there's new technologies that DOE is developing to help that process.

- So I've been in renewable energy for about 16 years.

The first few years of that were at Texas Tech University and grad school getting a PhD in wind science and engineering which prepared me for a career in renewables.

So then I started working for a wind project developer in Kansas City.

So we would do Greenfield wind project development, you know, developing projects like this, you know, from scratch.

And now I work as a consultant in renewables doing wind and solar development for various clients.

- Excellent.

And when you're talking about coming out into a Greenfield and just going from scratch, what is the process?

How does that begin?

- So the first thing we do is identify sort of in a big picture sense where the best location for a project will be.

Once we decide a general area we're interested in, we'll work with landlords and communities to see how accepting they are of the concept.

And once we start getting progress there, then we start doing lots of detailed development studies, you know, required to advance a project like this.

- And what is it that you're looking for when you're identifying these communities?

What about this location in particular was appealing?

- Right.

So for a project like this, you know, we're in Eastern Kansas.

So the fact that this location is close to Kansas City, which is a big, you know, load, they need a lot of power in Kansas City.

So the fact that this wind farm is close to Kansas City is very beneficial and a good transmission network is one of the most important things for a renewable project.

You wanna be able to get that power that's generated to the places where it's needed.

- How large is this particular wind farm?

- This wind farm has 95 wind turbines and it's a total power of 200 megawatts, which will power about 50,000 homes.

- And what's the footprint of a wind farm that size?

- So this wind farm, I believe is about 25 square miles.

So it's a pretty big footprint, but as you can see, the wind turbines actually don't take up that much space.

You know, all you have is the wind turbines and the roads and a substation.

And otherwise the land is used just as it was before the wind project was here.

- And so is that one of the benefits to the landowner that you're not really taking up a lot of the space on their land and so they can continue business as usual and this is just an sort of added bonus as far as their income?

- Absolutely.

A lot of land owners like wind in particular because they get a payment from the wind turbine that's totally unrelated to the rainfall or the cattle market or crop prices.

And yet they can still continue to run cattle or grow crops the same as they did essentially before.

So it's another revenue stream that diversifies them away from just the agricultural market.

- About how many of these wind farms would be needed to say, get a place like Kansas City completely off of fossil fuels?

- So wind farm like this will power approximately 50,000 homes.

So you would still need a fair amount of these to power an entire city, the size of Kansas City, you know, a couple million people, but, you know, there are projects like this going in in lots of places in Kansas and Nebraska and Missouri.

- I assume there's a reason why each turbine is where it is.

Can you talk to me just a little bit about surveying the site and determining where you put these?

- So once we have a project footprint defined and we have the leases that we need, then we start to determine exactly where each wind turbine's gonna go and so that is determined by several things.

First, the wind speed, you know, we want to be generally on the tops of hills, if we can, because any little bump in wind speed that we can get will really help the output from these turbines.

But we also have to take offsets into account, you know, we want to be a certain distance from houses, a certain distance from roads, a certain distance from environmentally sensitive areas.

So once you start to factor all those things together, you start to get a pretty clear picture of where the turbines can be and where they can't.

And you also have to factor in the efficiency of the farm because the turbines extract energy from the air, you need to space them apart so that one turbine doesn't steal too much wind from the other.

- Obviously the wind doesn't always blow in the exact same direction.

So how do you know how to orient them or do they move?

- They do.

So each wind turbine has a direction sensor on the top, and it's constantly taking readings of the wind direction.

And it has a yaw motor that will turn the wind turbine into the direction of the wind.

And the wind direction's very important in laying out where the wind turbines go.

Here in Kansas, generally the winds are South to North.

So you can see this wind farm is laid out in rows that are East West, where the turbines are closer together East West, and further apart North South.

And that's so that those southerly winds can recover before they make it to the next row of turbines.

- So, Kevin, how long does it take from the beginning of the project?

You come out here to a Greenfield to now 95 wind turbines producing energy.

What's the sort of timeline for that?

- Generally, it'll take three to five years for a wind project like this to be developed and constructed.

And it takes that long because you need to get lease agreements with the landowners, which take time.

You need to do a lot of studies to make sure that this is the right place for a wind project.

For example, we'll need to put up measurement towers to study the wind speeds, to make sure it's as windy as we thought it was going to be because that's important that the project generated as much power as we expected, you'll need to do environmental studies, you know, to make sure that all the species that are here, you know, were offset from those, the right distances, or we're not disrupting a habitat that we didn't intend to disrupt.

And then you need to find a buyer for the power from the project, which takes time, you know, these projects market their power competitively that are in competition with other projects and other fuel sources.

So once all that happens, then you can start constructing the project and it takes about a year to construct a project like this.

- Mike, how does the cost to generate energy through a wind turbine compare to what we think of as conventional power plant?

- Yeah.

The cost of wind energy is really competitive, particularly in areas where it's very windy, like in the Midwest, it's the cheapest form of energy available today in those areas, other parts of the country where the wind doesn't blow as strong, it costs a little more to generate.

So it's anywhere between two and 5 cents a kilowatt hour.

- Okay.

And are there places in the country where wind energy really isn't a viable option?

- Currently, yes.

So areas in the Southeast of the United States, you don't see any wind turbines today.

There's none deployed there.

And the challenge there is really has to do with the wind resource.

It's not that great.

That typical elevations say 80 meters, which is a nominal hub height to the wind turbine.

DOE is developing tall towers for wind turbines which are gonna reach up to 140, 160 meters tall.

The wind resource in the Southeast is actually quite good when you get up to those elevations.

And so these kind of innovations may make wind a viable option in the Southeast and other parts of the country.

- What's the approximate cost of one of these?

At what point is the energy that it's generating sort of paid for?

- These are expensive machines.

They have a lot of technology in them and they're big and expensive to put up.

And so each one of these machines cost maybe $2 million.

So in this wind farm, when you factor in construction costs and machine costs, you're looking at $300 million for a wind farm, which is an expense that all comes up front.

And then as the time goes by, it makes money by selling that energy over the life of the project.

- And what about the lifespan of one of these turbines.

How long can it last until it needs to be replaced?

- These turbines are designed to last 20 to 30 years.

- Mike, what role does the Department of Energy play in all of this that we're talking about?

- So the Department of Energy, and the Wind Energy's Technology Office in particular conducts research and development for wind turbines.

So we're looking to improve the technology, lower the cost of energy, just make the turbines work better.

In addition to that, we're really concerned about the environmental impacts that when turbines may have, so for offshore, we're concerned about Marine mammals, onshore, birds and bats.

We try to develop technologies in understanding to minimize the impact that wind turbines might have on stakeholders, fishermen, land users.

- What is it that these wind farms are doing to sort of help in the process of us getting off of fossil fuels?

- So the beautiful thing about wind is that the fuel is free.

It's not like other energy sources where you have to constantly extract and pay for the fuel.

Fuel is free and they use no water and they create no pollution.

So this energy that's being created here today is zero pollution, zero water use energy that can help with air quality, it can help with, you know, climate sustainability goals.

It's really a win-win on many different levels.

- And where do you see wind power fitting in to the overall grid?

I mean, I know we talk about solar.

We talk about hydro power.

Where does wind fall in there?

- I think wind is a major player, it's a mainstream energy source already today and even growing more so, but it's just one part of the mix, you know, I don't see a future where it's the United States is 100% wind powered.

You know, we need a mix, a diverse mix of wind, solar and hydro, and probably some natural gas to help, you know, create energy when the wind's not blowing or the sun's not shining.

- Mike, you've been studying this for a long time.

Are you optimistic about the future of wind energy?

- Oh, I am.

I think wind energy is gonna play an important role in our energy future, but it's one of many solutions.

It's not the only solution, it's gonna take solar, it's gonna take geothermal and other renewable sources in order to make our country as strong as it can be.

- How do you feel about the future?

Do you feel like we're moving in the right direction?

- I do.

I actually, I feel like now that now not just with wind energy, but across all the technologies, we are moving toward putting our focus, you know, really concentrating our focus on what can be commercialized.

What can we have market lift off and bring to the industry so that this is adopted nationwide and globally.

Wind energy both offshore and onshore has an especially important role to play in decarbonizing this grid and achieving clean energy economy.

And I feel really good about the very specific targets that we've laid out, for example, 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

Land-based wind already cost effective in many parts of the country, but getting that land-based wind to be even more cost effective across the country by investing in transmission and the infrastructure that's needed to get the wind from the middle of the country all the way out to the coast is just really important.

I'm bullish on where we're going with this, I'm really excited about the technology advances beyond solar and wind into geothermal, the work that we're doing with Marine energy.

There's so much going on right now.

We all feel the urgency of the moment and we're all pulling together for just straight on decarbonization.

We're committed and we're excited about it.

(upbeat music) - I heard like farm to table, right?

- Right.

And when you hear that, you think restaurants, I hear that all the time with restaurants.

- Right.

- It's truly a sustainable term, but how did you apply that to this functional art?

- Well, obviously I love the farm to table concept and the values behind it.

- What is the battery tour?

The battery tour is an outlet for you to be an outlet to plug in and connect to your passion.

Okay.

I was just commercial.

Yeah.

It's the battery towards exactly what it sounds like.

It's literally a tour powered by batteries.

(upbeat music)