Students will soon see “Doin’ it in the Dark” fliers hung around campus — but they aren’t promoting anything kinky.
The fliers, as well as the stickers on light switches and computer monitors, are a part of ASUO’s energy campaign.
The campaign is designed to encourage students and faculty to be energy-conscious, ASUO Elections Coordinator Courtney Hight said. The senior environmental studies major is in charge of the energy campaign, but students in various organizations around campus, including the Ecological Design Center, the Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory and OSPIRG, have also dedicated themselves to a campus-wide effort to reduce energy use.
The energy project began after a $30 energy fee appeared without warning on students’ bills fall term. Hight said she felt like the administration “slipped in” the fee when students were gone for the summer. While the energy fee has been lowered to $20 a term, Hight’s goal is to make sure the school is taking all measures necessary to save energy, she said.
“We (as students) need to pay, we’re willing and we know the money has to come from somewhere,” she said. “But we want to conserve energy.”
Hight said the campaign’s focus is about more than saving students money on their bills — she hopes students and faculty will turn out lights when they leave a room and turn off a computer when they’re done using it without any thought.
“I want to instill these values,” she said. “And maybe (students) will continue using them in their daily lives.”
As part of the campaign, ASUO representatives will be going into classrooms and residence halls to tell students what they can do to save energy.
“We’ve been getting a really positive response from people,” Hight said. “Many students aren’t aware that they pay an energy fee, and they’re not aware how easy it is to save energy and reduce their electric bills.”
If Hight has her way, stickers will soon appear above light switches and on computer screens around campus that read “Lights OFF Conservation ON” and “Conserving Energy = Saving YOU $$.”
The No. 1 money saver will be lowering heat in classrooms to 68 degrees, she said. But computer and electrical equipment use also hike up the bill significantly.
Hight said she’d like computer labs to turn off a portion of their computers during slow hours.
But EMU lab assistant Walt Norblad said turning off computers in the labs isn’t necessary because they automatically go into sleep mode when no one is using them, and it uses only about 50 watts versus the approximately 125 watts the computers use normally.
Still, Hight said, if you save those 50 watts and multiply that by all the unused computers around campus, the energy savings would be visible.
While Hight is busy raising awareness, ESBL is in the process of auditing all the buildings on campus to see what conservation efforts have been taken and what still needs to be done.
ESBL research associate Jeff Kline said the energy inefficiency of some buildings on campus is due to old windows, poor ventilation and weak insulation. He said the department is looking for ways to improve building efficiency in these areas. The department also is replacing light bulbs with more energy efficient bulbs.
But more needs to be done, he added. For example, right now ESBL can only monitor how much electricity is used in buildings on campus, he said. Buildings are heated by steam, and there is no way to monitor how much heat most of the individual buildings use, he said.
And while the department has data comparing electricity use in each building on campus, Kline said electricity building totals can’t be broken down to determine which components within the building are using the most electricity. In other words, he said, there is no concrete explanation for why the University Health Center used more than 80 kwh per square foot between June 2000 and May 2001 while the Knight Library used under 10 kwh per square foot.
OSPIRG is helping with the student outreach part of the campaign. OSPIRG New Energy Future coordinator Janis Austrmuehle said the bottom line is, “If you save energy, you reduce the impact you have on the earth.”
New Energy Future is a broader campaign to raise awareness about long-term energy alternatives — not just the short-term goal of saving students’ money, the freshman environmental studies major said.
“Students have to stop thinking short term and thinking, ‘Oh, it doesn’t affect me,’” she said.
E-mail reporter Diane Huber
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