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Reducing Energy Use on Campus
Among colleges, Olin ranks pretty high on energy efficiency, due partly to the newness of the campus and buildings. However, there are still a lot of areas where Olin could be doing better; while our buildings are relatively efficient, the habits of the people using those buildings are not as efficient. We came up with a couple of ways to foster more conscientious energy use at Olin.
"Real Time" Energy Use Display
It's been shown time and time again that if you are constantly being reminded of how much of a resource you are using, you'll almost always unconsciously use less of that resource. This tendency is true for just about any resource, whether it's money, gasoline, food (why do you think all chip bags are opaque?), or energy. We want to use this to our advantage by having real-time energy use graphs for all of the buildings displayed on the flatscreen TVs in the Campus Center and Milas Hall. And while we can't make these graphs entirely real-time, we are hoping to have update the data every day. We've been recording data on energy use in both dorms each day from the meters in the plant; more recently, we've been developing a python script that hopefully will extract, plot, and display energy use data for the entire campus each day from the energy monitoring software in the plant. Additionally, we realize that people don't look at the flatscreens very often; we are hoping that having actual relevant information on them will help change that, but we plan to put the data on the web as well, just in case, whether we put it on this page or on Olin's Sustainability Efforts page (yes, that exists).
Competition Between Dorms
Nothing produces results like pitting people against one another, which is why we'd love to pursue the idea of holding a friendly competition between East Hall and West Hall to see which can use the least energy over a certain time period. Obviously there will be some type of prize, though we've yet to determine what, exactly. There's also a slight caveat, which is that East Hall was more efficiently built than West Hall; we plan on calibrating the data and competition such that the efficiency difference doesn't distort the results. If you have any ideas on how this competition should be set up and carried out, you should talk to one of us!