investment

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.....

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: