Spotlight on Green Schools
Schools are focusing more and more heavily on cutting back on the energy they use and trying to reduce their impact on the environment. The articles on these pages spotlight individual campus energy conservation programs, energy initiatives, solar installations, energy-related technology, HVAC, research, grants, policy, and other topics related to green campuses.
Carnegie Mellon University has found that helping users change their behaviors regarding energy usage involves giving them information in an integrated form, monitoring building performance and making real-time data accessible and visible. The findings grew out of a predictive analytics project by the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics, a degree program and research center in the School of Architecture that studies advanced building technologies and designs as a way to improve "total-building" efficiency and performance.
Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, NY, has completed a 2,085-kilowatt solar installation designed to provide 11 percent of the institution's energy needs.
The University of California, San Diego will be installing a battery-based energy storage system on campus as the newest addition to its microgrid.
The University of California, Davis will build a solar power plant that will be the largest in the UC system and will meet 14 percent of the university's energy needs.
Houghton College, a small, Christian liberal arts college with about 1,000 students, is installing a 2.5 megawatt solar array on its campus in Western New York. The college broke ground on the project Wednesday.
The University of Iowa recently opened its new $126 million interdisciplinary biomedical research center, which sports what it claims is a first for the state: a green roof.
Culver-Stockton College has deployed an energy management platform in an effort to reduce costs.
As somebody walks down the halls of mixed-use building Welch Hall on the campus of California State University Dominguez Hills, ceiling lights automatically illuminate. A few moments later, after the person has passed by, the lights dim again. The result of that little bit of intelligence built into the lighting fixtures is a dramatic reduction in energy usage.
George Washington University, the American University and George Washington University Hospital have joined forces to launch a sustainable energy project that will bring 52 megawatts of solar power from North Carolina to the Washington, D.C.-based institutions.
This summer, Colorado State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will each receive four electric vehicles for a variety of sustainable research projects, including reducing the campus's carbon footprint; using vehicle sensor data; and broadening the understanding of the Internet of Things.
Stanford University has opened the Stanford Research Computing Center to serve the computational needs of researchers through an energy-efficient shared facility.
A team at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Architecture has developed a dashboard designed to help users see and reduce how much energy they use at work.
A high-power wall connector for Tesla electric cars has been installed for public use at Carnegie Mellon University's Electric Garage facility, a former gas station that houses electric vehicle research.
A new solar installation is powering an 11,064-seat multi-purpose arena at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The energy business arm of facilities services company ABM is installing a 2 MW solar array on Cornell University's Ithaca, NY, campus.