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Posted 04/26/02
The student group ECO, or Environmental Conservation Organization, is striving to improve its reporting of residence halls' energy use, and is working with the College to reduce residence hall energy consumption through the purchase of more efficient appliances. Among other projects, the group employs a dozen interns to work in areas of the College to improve their environmental practices. One of these interns works with Procurement Services to research environmentally sound purchases. Another internship, just created, will employ a student to reorganize all of the energy data currently available into more usable formats, and to research computer programs to track energy use over a short period of time, say a day, to better motivate students to conserve. Facilities Operations and Management pays for the intern's wages, and the interns working with other departments are paid by those departments. Oliver Bernstein '03, Coordinator of ECO, says a student program that runs contests for residence halls to conserve energy, called SPARC (Save Power and Receive Cash), has run up against a problem. While it's not hard to find students who are enthusiastic about conserving, it is hard to keep students motivated to conserve, because they don't know how much energy they're using, and therefore saving, often enough. SPARC holds a monthly contest, and the residence hall that saves the most electricity over the same month of the previous year wins an increase in its activities funding for the next term. Trouble is, a month is such a long time when students are here only for 10 weeks at a time. The excitement to conserve fizzles after about a week. Many campuses, Bernstein said, are investigating computerized programs that will enable them to tell how much energy a building uses on a daily basis, even by the minute. "We're working toward more of an up-to-date program," he said. "For example, in a day where everybody shuts out their lights in their rooms, we could see what that did.
With behavior conditioning, changing the way you use electronics or lights, you really need a better feedback system." Bernstein is working with students from the other Ivy League schools to adopt similar systems and compare results. "The technology is out there," he said. Another ECO effort is to persuade the College to replace the clothes dryers in all the residence halls. Bernstein quoted figures from the nonprofit group Project Laundry List, which say that in the average household, clothes dryers use about 6-10 percent of the household's energy. He estimates that the College would have to spend a hefty amount of money at first to replace all the dryers, but through reduced electricity costs, would recoup the money within a few years. "The College is very willing to help and very willing to fund these ideas that we have," Bernstein said, "but they don't have the resources to research all these products. We recruit students to call around, check catalogs, compare specs and prepare a presentation they can give to the Resource Working Group or Procurement Services. In our experience the College has been very good about spending a little more to do something that's a little better. That's been very helpful for us."
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