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.
Student engineers participating in EcoCAR are getting the opportunity to work with model-based design technologies with recent contributions from dSPACE, National Instruments, and The MathWorks. The hardware and software tools provided by the companies are helping 17 student teams design fuel-efficient cars of the future.
The University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg are partnering with UK-based Rolls-Royce to create the Commonwealth Center for Aerospace Propulsion Systems (CCAPS), a virtual research and technology center focused on propulsion systems.
The University of New Hampshire has begun powering its campus primarily with landfill gas, a first for a campus in the United States. The 5 million square-foot campus is receiving up to 85 percent of its electricity and heat from purified natural gas through EcoLine, a landfill gas-to-energy project that uses purified methane gas from a nearby landfill.
In pursuit of its goal to become paperless in 2010, California's Anaheim University said it is working with publishers to convert its textbooks into e-books to enable students to download and store their class materials on the Sony Electronic Book Reader or the Amazon Kindle.
The University of Minnesota Morris (UMM) has partnered with McKinstry, a construction, engineering, energy services, and facilities management firm, to help it become the first carbon neutral university in the Midwest, a goal it hopes to achieve by 2010.
A professor in Michigan has developed the means to know how to optimize the settings for refrigerated display cases to reduce their energy use by 13 percent.
The University of Utah in Salt Lake City has entered a joint venture with Headwaters to launch a company that captures and stores carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Headwaters Clean Carbon Services will provide services for CO₂ geologic storage and CO₂ used for enhanced oil recovery and enhanced coal-bed methane recovery.
Boston's Simmons College has received Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for its School of Management and Academic Building. The building, which opened in January, is Simmons's first structure built in accordance with the standards set by the USGBC's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system.
Tempe-based Arizona State University and Albuquerque, NM-based Advent Solar are forming a partnership to advance solar photovoltaic (PV) technology.
The United States Department of Energy recently announced that it will establish 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers through its Office of Science to "accelerate the scientific breakthroughs needed to build a new 21st-century energy economy." The department is committing $777 million over the next five years to the effort.
Don't know where to begin your green campus initiative? You may already have "fertile" ground for a solid sustainability launch.
The University of Maine Farmington beat out 18 other colleges nationwide in a Climate Savers competition to recruit faculty, students, and staff to pledge to commit to sustainable computing practices. The university won with more than 24 percent of the campus community pledging to power down their computers and buy an Energy Star-qualified computer for their next PC purchase.
Is your data center ripe for virtualization? New assessment services from CDW Government (CDW-G) have been launched to help answer just that question.
The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) Horn Point Laboratory has selected Constellation Energy's Projects & Services Group to implement energy and cost saving projects.
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego will partner with Darkstrand, a company that operates a high-speed optical network nationwide.
