Only one-tenth of Vermont Yankee’s original 650 workers remain at the shut-down nuclear plant, with all but 10 Entergy employees expected to remain once transfer of spent fuel to storage casks is completed a little over a year from now.
The lost jobs, with an average salary of over $100,000 a year, are forever gone from the tri-state region’s economy, along with the $90 million a year in annual economic impact. Franklin County, along with Vermont’s Windham County and New Hampshire’s Cheshire County have been working on finding a way to fill that economic vacuum.
The focus, developed with help from a $230,000 federal grant last year, is to build an “ecovation” sector of the economy, fueled by the emerging green building design and engineering expertise in southern Vermont and its neighboring counties.
As part of that push, Greenfield Community College, together with Antioch-New England and Keene State College in Keene, N.H. and the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vt., are collaborating to provide education and training for jobs that are foreseen for the anticipated emerging economic sector.
The new Education and Training Consortium brings together GCC’s existing Sustainable Agriculture and Green Energy (SAGE) program, an umbrella for the college’s renewable energy/energy efficiency, farm and food systems and environmental science courses, with Keene State’s sustainable design and building science courses, and SIT’s graduate-level programs in environmental sustainability and Antioch’s Center for Climate Preparedness and Community Resilience.
The four-college consortium is a small part of the overall ecovation hub, which has brought together entrepreneurs, researchers and other officials looking at ways to translate the region’s pioneering work in energy retrofit projects and sustainable and energy-efficient building design into ventures.
Among the other projects being explored are developing software to help communities and campuses analyze potential building risk to natural disaster, manufacturing advanced laminated timber products that can replace steel and concrete in construction, developing wool insulation and creating the nation’s first zero-net-energy, zero-net-water “living community challenge” demonstration village.
“We have so many great resources for people to a get hands-on experience in green building, high-performance building, resilient design and other aspects of community resilience,” said hub leadership team member Abigail Abrash Wilson, who also co-directs Antioch-New England’s Center for Climate Preparedness and Community Resilience.
Along with the four-college consortium, the center is a piece of the hub’s Knowledge Center component for training municipal and county planners and decision makers on preparing for natural disasters, including dealing with community involvement, public health and policy issues.
A final piece of the knowledge center is a planned “living lab” of programs around the tri-state region that green-building professionals can visit to see what’s here and bring those ideas back to their communities.
Centered around a three-county region that Wilson noted is at “the edge zones” away from each of the three states’ “power centers,” the consortium connects the Greenfield, Keene and Brattleboro centers in a way that adds momentum to their potential to build their economic development potential and synergy, she said.
“We’ve connected with the other institutions to look at ‘What’s our role in all this?’” says Teresa Jones, who chairs GCC’s science department. After exploring how the four colleges can work together, she adds, “What emerged is that we have pretty much every level of higher education, plus our connection to the high school and technical school level, so there’s the idea of a ‘2+2+2+2’ pathway” in which students can layer on levels of coursework from high school through graduate-degree programs and even return to gain specific skills.”
The college, which has about 70 students enrolled in its SAGE program, is applying for a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Educational grant to help it build out the integrated four-college program in which courses at one institution could be available to students from another if it meets their educational or career development needs, to explore areas like climate preparedness, international sustainable development or architectural modeling.
The $200,000-a-year grant sought for two years could also help the four colleges develop hands-on internships, she said.
“One of the things we bring to the collaboration is the depth of our connection with employers and our orientation toward a combined workforce training and education,” she said. “What we’re hoping to do is expand our geographical breadth,” where students may be able to do internships closer to where they live.
Although ecovation hub planning is a work in progress — its pace slowed as participants try to find renewed funding after its initial grant ran out in September — the college consortium is moving ahead in creating a structure that can be in place to help the hub’s economic development efforts as they become better defined, said Wilson.
Jones adds that working together, the colleges are seeing gaps in what may be needed, so they’re each working on developing from their areas of strength. At GCC, that means building its capacity to offer courses in ecological restoration, which involves revitalizing ecosystems and habitat, such as wetlands.
The offerings through GCC and aspects of the hub as they develop will likely also tie into the workforce training programs through the Franklin–Hampshire Regional Employment and Training Center. And they “absolutely help” the work of Greenfield-based Northeast Sustainable Energy Association in developing the green building industry, says its executive director Jennifer Marrapese.
“We hear a clamoring from our members for skilled labor,” Marrapese says. “They have a really, really hard time finding skilled carpenters who are interested in joining the industry, who understand the benefits. I feel this effort could really help our members, who are doing green building in the Pioneer Valley, enhance their workforce so they can do more work.”
At NESEA, she adds, “We don’t do a lot of hands-on training. I think this only enhances the (professional development) work that we’re doing and helps us grow the community.”
With sustainable science as a common vision as each of the players put the jigsaw pieces of the hub together, Jones says, “We see this as really important for the planet, and also for our regional economy.”
On the Web:
http://bit.ly/EcoGCC