efficiency

College campuses are microcosmic. They have long served as institutes of higher education, but also as environments of change and innovation where the free exchange of ideas and influences are encouraged. College campuses are simply primed for social, political, economic, and now environmental experimentation. They can demonstrate efforts in these areas with the potential to extend to larger communities. Whether they succeed is another matter entirely. But either way, their attempts show us where we can go – what we can achieve.

Within the context of energy sustainability, many college campuses are well on their way to this goal, pioneering novel systems design or implementing local sources of renewable energy. And that brings us to the geothermal energy system project currently underway at Missouri University of Science and Technology, giving yet another example of how economic energy efficiency can be. Covered in a recent environmentalLEADER article, this new energy system is predicted to cut the annual campus energy consumption in half. According to Missouri S&T’s project website, the system will also reduce CO₂ emissions by 25,000 tons per year and save 8,000,00 gallons of water per year – not to mention the economic incentive of saving and estimated $1 million in energy costs and operations annually.

To be completed by 2014, the project will replace the existing coal and woodchip fueled steam plant that provides campus buildings with heating and cooling services. Approximately 600 wells will be drilled, connected by an underground system of pipes that will create a larger closed loop system. This network of pipes will link the three planned geothermal plants on Missouri S&T’s campus. Each of these plants will be equipped with heat pump chillers, supplemental cooling towers, and gas-fired boilers.

Of course, Missouri S&T is not the only university that uses a steam plant to heat entire college campuses. Here at the University of Idaho, a biomass fueled steam plant provides 63 buildings on campus with heating services.

In contrast to Missouri S&T’s progress, UI replaced their coal, natural gas, and diesel based system with biomass. While 90 percent of the required steam in produced by burning biomass, natural gas is still used as a backup. The majority of the biomass supply is primarily cedar chip wood waste from the regional sawmills. According to the university website, these saw mills actually own their timberlands. The wood is produced, processed, and the ensuing waste recycled entirely in state – making it a sustainable supply. This fuel choice, like Missouri S&T, was also influenced by cost. Woodchips are about one-third the cost of natural gas and save UI over $1.5 million annually.....

DETROIT, December 21, 2011 – The Columbia University Journalism School has awarded Detroit Public Television’s groundbreaking documentary Beyond The Light Switch an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award.  Produced in partnership with Scientific American magazine and aired around the country, the production took a new, in-depth look at the controversy and urgency surrounding the challenge of developing a new infrastructure for electricity in the United States. 

For 70 years, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards have recognized excellence in broadcast journalism. Regarded today as the most prestigious prize in broadcast news, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes, the duPont-Columbia Awards bring the best in broadcast and digital journalism to professional and public attention and honor those who produce it. The duPont-Columbia Awards engender a collective spirit for the industry and inform the public of the contributions news organizations make to their communities and to the world. 

The two-hour documentary premiered nationally in April, 2011 and was seen in all 20 Top broadcast markets as well as in 92 percent of the Top 50 domestic markets.  It has been available to one hundred million households in the U.S. and has been broadcast nearly 2500 times on public television.  The two hour broadcast has also generated more than 100 hours of video assets that have been featured around the web.

Produced by Detroit Public Television’s Ed Moore and guided by an independent advisory panel convened by the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Beyond The Light Switch is hosted by David Biello, energy and environment associate editor at Scientific American.  He takes viewers to a first-of-its-kind coal plant in West Virginia, gas wells in Pennsylvania and Texas, inside a nuclear reactor under construction in Tennessee, to wind farms along the Hood River Valley in Oregon and to the shores of Cape Cod, among other places around the country that showcase the options for our energy future.

“This award is the highest level of recognition for the professionals who completed this project and our organization’s commitment to exploring the issues most important to our community and country,” said Rich Homberg, President and General Manager of Detroit Public Television.  “We hope this will allow even more Americans to be exposed to the balanced perspective in Beyond The Light Switch to prepare our country to face a challenge more critical than anything since healthcare."

A small college established in Unity, Maine in the 1960’s due to economic necessity has evolved into an unlikely success story and a haven for environmental education. Established on what was once a chicken hatchery, Unity College has grown from humble and precipitous origins into Unity’s largest employer and an example of sustainability and non-traditional education.

Located in the scenic mid-Coast county of Waldo, Maine, Unity College proudly applies the title of “America’s Environmental College,” a moniker earned through years of financial insecurity, perseverance, and a growing dedication to environmental activism and education. Established in 1965 by a group of local businessmen, Unity College has since become a welcoming environment for students looking for an education that centers on ecology, sustainability and global change. Students who graduate from Unity College are poised to become productive leaders in the spheres of environmental activism, business and political policy. Hands-on courses get students out of the classroom and interacting with nature, while intercollegiate and club sports including soccer, ice hockey and ultimate Frisbee cultivate an active and competitive community.

Recently, Unity College appeared in Detroit Public TV’s documentary Beyond the Light Switch for their role in reigniting a national dialogue on renewable energy. This debate has its origins in the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who in 1979 put 32 solar panels atop the White House in a symbolic statement on the future of energy. President Carter predicted, accurately, that the solar panels might possibly come to symbolize “a road not taken,” which is exactly what happened when they were removed during the Reagan administration and stored in a cavernous government warehouse to collect dust. Unity College enters the story in the early ‘90s when then-development director Peter Marbach (now a fine arts photographer living in Oregon) asked the US government if he could take the unused panels for use at Unity College. The General Services Administration assented and Marbach personally picked up the unused solar panels from the federal warehouse. 16 of the 32 panels then went to heating Unity College’s cafeteria [pictured] for over a decade. Since then, many of the solar panels have been loaned out, donated, or put in storage. Last year Unity College earned some press for donating one of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels to the Himin Solar Energy Group of China, to be put on display at the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou....

Today we would like to remember and pay tribute to a BTLS Expert who has recently passed away. Professor Lester Lave of Carnegie Mellon University was a renowned economist and humanitarian. One of his most important legacies remains his research—the critically important research which first established a direct link between air pollution and its health impacts on humans. Lester's findings would eventually become the basis for early federal and state regulations to improve air quality in the U.S.

Lester earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard University and served eight years as head of CMU's Department of Economics. Lester was also Director of the Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute and Co-Director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. Lester first caught the attention of BTLS producers because of his integral role in energy and efficiency related research—but it was his outspoken nature and unwavering dedication to the truth that really make his presence in the documentary a standout. Interviewing Lester was truly an honor.

Lester is survived by his wife of 46 years, Judith, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh and their two children; Jonathan M. Lave of Washington, D.C., and Tamara R. Lave of Miami; and two grandsons. His family has asked that memorial contributions be made to charity.

Click here to read the New York Times’ tribute to Mr. Lave, or hit 'Read more' below to read a thoughtful account of Lester’s professional history, written for the Environmental Science and Technology journal by a few of Lester’s friends and fellow Carnegie Mellon professors; Jay Apt, Chris T. Hendrickson and M. Granger Morgan.......

It's a professorial paradox to be sure. Naturally, there's a lot of ground to cover. To be "sustainable" is to possess the capacity to endure. Sort of broad-sounding, no? For clarity, if we look to the secondary definition of the term, Wiktionary lists the meaning as "able to be sustained for an indefinite period without damaging the environment, or without depleting a resource; renewable."

This modern definition of the term certainly narrows things down for us, yet 'sustainability' remains a dense subject matter. And a sticky one. When talking about issues related to the topics of energy, environment and economy, there are many differing viewpoints out there. For the topic of energy in particular, unraveling the knot of policy roadblocks, technological limitations, and environmental issues only complicates things further. In today's hyper-polarized media climate, sorting out the issues– and deciding where you stand– is a challenge for most people.

And if sustainability is hard to learn about, just imagine what it's like to teach people– young people, at that– how to better understand and develop a sustainable economic infrastructure in world with so many highly unsustainable systems in place. How do you tell them what they need to know when so much of the information that contextualizes each issue is either inaccessibly technical or under-informed and biased?

One man is offering solutions, and Beyond the Light Switch is helping to animate his commendable efforts in public education. Professor Greg Möller, Ph.D.  teaches a course called Principals of Sustainability at the University of Idaho, and he's using footage from Beyond the Light Switch to help disseminate information on sustainable energy use. Dr. Möller's using what he calls "an experimental pedagogy" and incorporating new technologies in order to teach his students about what it's going to take in order to turn our current energy economy into something that's sustainable on a global scale.

To that end, Dr. Möller has created a 10-chapter, multi-part series of 'doculectures' on all things related to sustainability– everything from waste management to electric generation. Anything that can and should be made sustainable, really. The series is still a work in progress, with the doculecture chapters falling under the umbrella of Dr. Möller's online course. Each doculecture is available for viewing on Vimeo now. 

For Chapter 6 in his series, titled Energy Sustainability, Dr. Möller  drew upon footage from BTLS to help put our current use of fossil fuels, alternative energies, and the power grid into perspective for his students. BTLS and the Braintrust are incredibly pleased to be part of a growing curriculum committed to energy education. Here are some additional doculectures from the series that Dr. Möller  picked out as especially interesting to fans and followers of Beyond the Light Switch: