Last autumn, I had the opportunity to introduce NWF’s Cool School Challenge (CSC) to schools throughout Whatcom County, Washington as part of a partnership with the Community Energy Challenge (CEC) and the EPA’s Climate Showcase Communities Grant. The schools I worked with were able to save energy, shrink their carbon footprint, and in return, protect the planet. It was very rewarding to observe students’ excitement about taking energy-saving action into their own hands.

Photo courtesy RESources

With regard to meeting current standards, 5th grade teachers found that since their “newest science kit is all about energy, the types, forms, transfers, etc… thinking about energy in our classroom, school, and homes was a great fit” (5th grade teacher). “Real-life connections work with math and science concepts,” said a 6th grade teacher. Many teachers were able to conduct the program in conjunction with their science curriculum as well as involve their entire school.

Photo courtesy RESources

Overall, teachers were excited about and satisfied with the program. “This was a great program that my kids really enjoyed” said one teacher. “(There was) lots of valuable material covered which affect all of us every day on Earth,” said another.

RE Sources for Sustainable Communities worked on the CSC/CEC partnership for 3 years. During that time, 18 schools in six Whatcom County Districts participated, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 245,284 pounds.

This was such a successful program, and I really believe the students gained a lot more awareness about their use of energy and electricity, and how making simple changes in their lives can make a big impact.

The Cool School Challenge was developed by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, and transferred over to the National Wildlife Federation so that it could be incorporated into the Eco-Schools USA program. The Eco-Schools USA program is part of the largest green school in the world, and aims at greening the school building, grounds, curriculum and student experience.

Learn more about Eco-Schools USA and how you can do the Cool School Challenge at your school!

Ella Power and Sun Puppies, from The Power Family series of books.

Mount Energy Elementary, Creedmoor, NC: “We plan to conserve energy by turning off lights every time we leave a room, and by turning off hall lights during days that are well lit by natural sunlight.”

Neillsville Elementary, Neillsville, WI: “We plan to use powerstrips to turn off daily used items (Smartboards, lamps, etc), and motion detectors in our big areas to control lights and ventilation.”

Mary Rieke Elementary, Portland, OR: “We plan to create signs to encourage people to turn off lights and computers and to help us create a school culture to save energy. We also plan to take light level readings in each classroom and then remove excess light bulbs.”

Olathe Public Schools, Olathe, KS: ”We have begun upgrading lighting fixtures at two schools.  We are replacing metal halide lights in gyms with T5 florscents and replaced light fixtures with electronic ballasts and T8 bulbs.  We just installed LED light fixtures as part of some pilot projects and if the small pilot goes well the next step will be to do a whole school in LEDs so we can get an accurate reading of the energy savings.”

Coral Grove Elementary, Marimar, FL: ”We plan on conserving energy by shutting lights off when not in use, closing doors,turning regrigerator thermometers down, and practicing reduce, reuse and recycle.”

Nova Eisenhower Elementary, Davie, FL: ”We have teachers assign students jobs such as turning off the lights when they exit the classroom and making sure water sources are turned off completely when not in use. We also try to conserve water on our campus by landscaping with native plants that use less water.”

“During our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) class, students are studying various forms of energy and how they affect individuals and the environment. We are working on a project with the town water department to teacher water uses and conservation and another project with an engineer focusing on submersibles using buoyancy instead of fossil fuels to conduct research.”

Want to learn more about the Power Families series? Visit  author Susan Seville’s website!

Solar panel installation (flickr | OregonDOT)

About the HELiOS Project

KyotoUSA got its start in 2004 when a group of friends came together and acknowledged that climate change was the most important crisis facing the planet and that we all had a role to play in addressing it. We all worked hard over the next two years, focusing our efforts on getting local cities to formally adopt the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that are part of the Kyoto Protocol. Our local efforts paid off in a big way when Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels took the idea to the US Conference of Mayors who enlisted over 1,000 cities and their mayors. This signified many cities, counties and states’ move toward meaningful action against climate change.

We recognize that meaningful change isn’t easy—it’s hard work. We have tried to think strategically  in looking for places where large amounts of energy and water are consumed and that when addressed would have other meaningful benefits. It did not take us long to realize that California’s (and by extension  America’s)  public schools were just the place to focus our attention.

Why Schools?

Schools consume significant amounts of energy and water at a cost that has a real impact on the quality of the education our children receive. In the last few years, as school budgets have been cut, districts have been looking much more closely at all their expenditures. Districts have discovered that there is a lot of energy wasted and that their schools can be excellent sources for producing local clean energy from the sun and wind. Enter the HELiOS Project, a way for school districts to build their own renewable energy systems to offset the cost of the electricity they use.

In 2006, KyotoUSA began advocating for the installation of renewable energy systems on Berkeley’s public schools. We identified several key benefits of addressing energy issues in our public schools:

1. Reduce schools’ operating costs – fossil-fuel-generated electricity has been increasing in cost beyond its historic average, putting increasing pressure on the District’s operating budget. Reducing energy consumption and adding solar panels can help make a district more fiscally sound
2. Reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced to make electricity –electricity from solar panels is virtually free of climate change-causing pollution and other toxic air contaminants
3. Enhance science education – Adding solar panels is a great opportunity to introduce the science of renewable energy to its students, in keeping with Eco-Schools USA’s mission
4. Demonstrate our commitment to our children’s future – there may be no greater threat to our children’s future than climate change. We must begin to invest in visible, effective actions that show our children that we are taking the threat seriously…and remaking the energy footprint of our kids’ schools is a great start.

See Top Ten Tips to Minimize Energy Use at the Eco-Schools USA website

While our focus tends to be the facilities in a given school district, we understand that improving energy efficiency and finding ways to produce on-site renewable energy can also serve as a great educational opportunity. In partnering with NWF’s Eco-Schools USA, we hope to inspire, and be inspired by, students nationwide who deserve to grow up in an environment that is healthy and sustainable.

Stay tuned for more on the partnership between the HELiOS Project and Eco-Schools USA on Wildlife Promise and read more about it here. While you’re at it, check out ten tips for schools to reduce energy use and fast facts on energy use on the Eco-Schools USA website.

© competetoreduce.org

This November, NWF co-sponsored (with the Alliance to Save Energy) the first national Lucid Design Group contest, the “Campus Conservation Nationals,”  among 40 U.S. campuses to reduce (in real time) energy usage in their residence halls.  Full information about the contest can be found at competetoreduce.org.

The contest ran for 20 days, and  Lucid Design Group placed monitoring systems in the dorms so that students could see their actual energy use – and could take steps to lower it – by dorm building.

Lucid Design develops dashboards that convert energy management into actual social networks.

During the 20 days, 120,000 students in these schools collectively reduced electricity consumption by 508,694 kilowatt-hours to save $50,209 and avoid putting 816,394 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

With a 25.8% reduction in electricity use, DePauw University was the top campus reducer. The school engaged in a wide variety of activities for promotion, marketing and motivating students, including having the Residential Assistants on each participating floor to create bulletin boards with energy-saving “Battle Tactics” to provide students with inspiration on ways to conserve. Humbolt University was the winner for water conservation, with a campus-wide reduction of 15.4%.

“Everyone who had the opportunity to participate should be commended for their individual enthusiasm and collective action in making the first-annual competition a huge success. Not only does this prove that behavior change can achieve significant savings, but we’ve taken another significant step toward creating cultures of conservation on campuses,” said Andrew de Coriolis, Public Programs Manager at Lucid.

Organizers are hopeful that getting 120,000 students from campuses from Kentucky to California and from Ohio to New York active in energy and water conservation will yield lasting results far beyond the 20 days of the contest. In addition to increasing awareness and understanding of energy and water conservation, the contest may have helped students change the longterm patterns for their water and electricity use. Research has confirmed that 21 days is the time it takes to create a new habit, so that by the end of the Campus Conservation Nationals, there is reason to hope that the new behaviors developed will have become a new part of the students’ daily lives.

The way most of us receive energy data at work and at home is in aggregated quantities such as kilowatt-hours and btus per month or per year. But like run totals in baseball, total energy units consumed is only a quantity, and drawing conclusions about the efficiency of a building just based on this quantity alone is as questionable as drawing conclusions solely on one team’s run production in baseball. After all, sometimes the data can deceive you. While the 2005 Astros only scored 693 runs, they went to the World Series. It was a season to remember. The 2007 Astros, despite plating 723 runs, finished in fourth place and both the manager and general manager were fired before Labor Day. It was a season to forget. 

While literally millions of Americans — from die-hard fans to casual observers — understand the different measures to evaluate a baseball player and team (often in stunning detail), they have no such commensurate understanding for analyzing their utility bills. We simply have no feel for assessing the performance of conservation measures. We can sometimes answer the question “did we use more or less energy,” but not “did we use energy more or less efficiently?” 

The first step, which many have taken, is to individually meter each building for each utility consumed (e.g. electricity, chilled water, steam). As the old management saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. But it’s also hard to manage what you measure inadequately. If we were to meter chilled water consumption for a campus building annually (i.e. the amount of cold water produced in a chiller at a campus utility plant and delivered in a pipe to that building over the course of a year to provide cooling), we might see totals such as 830,000 ton-hours in 2008, and 815,000 ton-hours in 2009. Other than to inform us about the total quantity of consumption (perhaps for billing purposes), the data is as potentially misleading as the annual run totals in the baseball example. We don’t know if in one year we operated the building more efficiently than the other. We don’t know how weather might have influenced consumption. We don’t know what times of the day, week, month, or year consumption might have been abnormally high or abnormally low (and we don’t know what abnormal is either). While monthly data provides clues about the seasonal variation in consumption, it is otherwise fraught with the same issues described above. Imagine, then, the challenge of justifying proposed capital investments in energy conservation projects, or evaluating the effectiveness of completed projects, when numbers on actual savings are misleading.

Breaking out consumption by hour helps to pinpoint how efficient the system is under certain conditions.

The next step is to provide near real time web-accessible meter readings that show exact consumption data at any given time during the day. Such data enables timely investigations to uncover potential problems, and greatly improves the effectiveness of troubleshooting. Consider Figure 1, which shows the actual consumption of chilled water for a two-day period in August 2009 for one of our campus buildings, Sewall Hall. The blue line shows the shape of chilled water consumption for the building over that time, which is considerably more useful than a single reading aggregating an entire day (or week, or month). We see quite clearly that the chilled water has a hard spike in the early morning, which would have remained undetected in a world of traditional meter readings. (If all campus buildings were to exhibit this start-up behavior, the Central Plant would be in disarray trying to react to it.) The consumption then settles in the range of about 120 tons of chilled water per hour across the daytime and into the evening.

We can also see that between 10 and 11PM chilled water consumption drops to almost zero, thanks to the implementation of a campus building temperature policy about one month prior to the days shown in Figure 1. Indoor temperature is allowed to drift upwards during the overnight hours, and then between 6 and 7AM the building is cooled back down just in time for the arrival of the first employees and the morning custodial team. This consumption profile makes sense for Sewall Hall, a building with classrooms, academic offices, and an art gallery, all of which are typically used only between the hours of 8AM to 10PM.

So, Figure 1 represents an example of the type of data that is displayed in today’s building energy dashboards and other smart meter applications. Recall, however, that we want to answer the question of whether we are using energy more or less efficiently, not whether we are using more or less in total. We want to get beyond run production, and start talking about wins and losses. While the data displayed in Figure 1 is certainly useful, and may even influence behavior when properly presented, one cannot make claims about verifiable energy savings based on this alone. Can someone claim that the savings from the nighttime setback should be calculated as roughly 125 tons of chilled water (if you extend the daytime consumption) across an approximately 8-hour time-span, or 1000 ton-hours of chilled water per night? Using a methodology and suite of tools developed by Rice University energy managers over the past decade and a half, you will see that the answer is no. 

The energy consumption of a building from one time period to the next is influenced by a number of variables, including outdoor enthalpy (a combination of temperature and humidity), indoor enthalpy, time of day, day of the week, and day of the year. In Figure 1, the second day could have been significantly warmer or more humid than the first. Or perhaps heavy clouds rolled in from the Gulf of Mexico, reducing daytime peak temperatures. The first evening could have been exceptionally cool, or stifling and sticky. To properly account for these issues, our energy managers have created weather-normalized baseline models for chilled water, steam, and electrical consumption for many of our campus buildings. These baselines define the building’s operational personality, be it a well-behaved building or a building behaving poorly. These personalities are derived from how the building actually operates, regardless of the building’s design specifications. By then comparing these baselines against actual meter data, we can finally verify building energy savings. 

The second figure shows how the baseline adjusts to account for changes in weather or usage.

Figure 2 represents the next big step in building energy management. You will see the same consumption profile from the meter (in blue) that was shown in Figure 1. Displayed in red is a weather-normalized baseline model for chilled water consumption for Sewall Hall. This tells us how much chilled water we would expect to be consumed at Sewall Hall at any given time. Observe how the model changes during the day and night, and note that on day two the red line reaches a bit higher than on day one. This reflects higher enthalpy on day two, meaning we would expect to consume more chilled water to account for this particular weather condition versus day one. The weather guessing game has been removed — we don’t need to recall if one day was humid or the next was hot but unusually dry, because the baseline adjusts to account for it. 

Now look specifically at the red and blue lines of Figure 2 as they relate to one another. The model provides the context for truly understanding consumption. We see that on both days, we are indeed wasting energy as the building starts up in the morning, as the blue line of actual consumption exceeds the red line of the predictive model. Then consumption of chilled water tends to track the model closely across the late morning, afternoon, and into the evening. What we see though once consumption drops sharply after 10PM is that the model – constructed from historical data of building energy consumption for a given enthalpy – reduces as well, but only down to about 90 tons of chilled water per hour, not zero. The nighttime setback is a new wrinkle. What the model shows is how chilled water consumption historically declined overnight as the final classes would let out and the last faculty and staff would go home, leaving an otherwise almost empty building to operate as if it were a 24-hour facility. Therefore, the savings in chilled water for the night of August 17-18^th is not the 1,000 tons of chilled water as estimated above, but more like 90 tons of chilled water per hour across an 8-hour time period, or about 720 ton-hours of chilled water. This is 28% less than the initial estimate, and far more precise. If we assume a cost of chilled water of $0.16 per ton-hour, then we can report to our administrators with confidence that the savings in chilled water due to the nighttime setbacks in Sewall Hall for the night of August 17-18^th, 2009 was about $115.20. That’s a win. And, by plotting the meter data against the model, we know that we are wasting energy due to the hard starts in the morning, and we can quantify exactly how much. Thanks to our new model, each morning at Rice doesn’t begin with a consumption profile that looks like a stalagmite.  

The ability to plot meter data against a predictive baseline is a game-changer. At Rice, every two weeks we hold an interdepartmental committee meeting to review the performance of a number of our campus buildings using this tool. Participants represent maintenance, the central plant, housing and dining, project management and engineering, utility management, custodial, and sustainability. In addition, several members of this committee use these tools daily to assess performance, quantify savings, and identify problem areas. We can now accurately answer the question “did we use energy more or less efficiently?” – not just “did we use more or less?” – an answer that positions us to implement, understand, and verify the effect of energy conservation measures, to report real savings, and to quantify the resulting greenhouse gas emissions reductions from those conservation measures, all without wondering how weather may have affected the data.

The approach to energy management developed at Rice is now embedded in a campus energy management system that connects many disparate data sources, including several building controls systems, various district cooling plant systems, and the internet.  We are creating dashboards for building lobbies, with weather-normalized energy and carbon reporting at the building-level. However, this approach needs to spread far beyond just campus environments. (So far, Rice, Dartmouth, the University of Iowa and the city of Houston are the only organizations I know that use this system.) A simple display of actual vs. expected energy consumption, in a manner easily understood by everyone from facility managers to employees to homeowners to tenants, is the next “killer app” of building energy technology. By putting the consumption data in context, what was once an abstract and confusing quantity for the average person is given meaning, much as comparing runs scored for one baseball team versus runs scored by their opponents gives the quantity meaning. Now we know how to tell whether and when we are truly using energy in buildings more efficiently or not.  For energy management, the game has changed.

Richard Johnson is the Director of Sustainability for Rice University. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Environment and Society (CSES). Richard holds an appointment as a Professor in the Practice of Environmental Studies in Sociology and has taught several classes at Rice. Richard is also a research fellow for the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life (CORRUL). Richard received a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Rice University, and a Masters in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia.

The author wishes to acknowledge the work of Mark Gardner and Eric Valentine, who have demonstrated that facilities departments can be a source of innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as John Windham, whose prowess in squeezing energy savings from campus buildings is now closely and accurately measured using Mark and Eric’s software.

Green IT is a booming industry, but how can students interested in smart grid or renewable energy technologies distinguish themselves in the field? We asked several experts to describe the way forward in the land of green information technology.

“This is a growth area, and a student that maintains a narrow focus in computer science would find it difficult to get immediate employment in [the renewable energy sector],” explains Dr. Ravi Prakash, associate professor in computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Traditional information technology (IT) programs, whether they are offered by a community college or through a university graduate program, maintain a narrow focus on one subject area such as software engineering, computer science, applied information systems technology, network administration, or data analysis and reporting. He recommends that regardless of the focus students should augment their education by participating in seminars and electives that focus on issues like smart grid technology, renewable energy, and other clean tech topics, even if they are offered by other academic departments.

This sentiment was echoed by Michelle Naquin, CEO of the Green Technology Alliance (GTA), who says that students “Should look for programs in known areas of certification that include specific modules on green, clean and sustainability.  The scope of the work and areas of impact make it difficult to create ‘specialist’ programs.”

Prakash goes on to say, “It is extremely important for students to have an interdisciplinary focus-if I’m going to make a tool [for an electrical utility, for instance] that will be used by a different area of specialization, it behooves me to understand how it will be used. Students need to use their electives to broaden their outlook.”

Prakash fosters this interdisciplinary approach by encouraging grad students to work with him on various research projects. In particular, Prakash is researching how the renewable energy sector will be integrated with the smart grid. “It’s a large-scale networking problem,” he says. As tax incentives lead to thousands, if not millions, of home-installed solar systems networked into the utility grid for net-metering purposes, many new IT problems will be created.

Consider, for instance, what happens when thousands of homes are fitted with solar panels, each producing several hundred kilowatts of energy. By comparison, a single coal burning plant will produce thousands of megawatts.  ”The rate at which energy is produced [by these solar panels] and the time at which it is produced is unpredictable, which creates interesting issues for electric utilities trying to meet demands, explains Prakash. “Normally they have baseline amounts and they have backup sources that come online when peak is high. When you add a large number of smaller sources, the variability significantly increases.”

As a result, utility companies will need to find ways to manage many points of data, especially how much energy is being produced at any given point. “The utilities will need to react very quickly to these changes and demand so that they can bring their surplus generators online or offline as needed. Then, all of these data points have to be accumulated in databases. And we need experts in statistical analysis who can optimize pricing, etc so that they can avoid peaks in energy demand to flatten it out as much as they can.”

Fairfield University’s School of Engineering also lacks a formal green focus, but they are developing research opportunities for students interested in exploring renewable energy and smart grid issues. “I have a solar project on campus and we’re collecting data-every 16 minutes we get 20 points of data (during daylight),” explains Dr.  Evangelos Hadjimichael, dean of the school of engineering. “I’m using IT to analyse the data-data collection is accumulated by a computer and the data is collected by a data logger and transmitted to a computer and then we use that computer to collect and manage and deduce the data.”

Beyond formal education, Angela McClowry, co-founder of open-sustainability.org, an organization dedicated to developing a free and open standard for sustainability based on information management, suggests that students can also look to expand their education by getting training in environmental engineering, degrees in sustainability, or certification with LEED.

Students can also get traditional degrees and then learn on the job. Ian Thomson, one of the co-founders of CleanTechies, is working on a number of different projects that make use of conventional software tools for green purposes. Using modified CAD (computer-aided design) programs on ProjectFrog, they’re developing software that makes buildings more efficient, “We show our customers how a building is going to look and how it will perform in terms of its energy,” says Thomson.

In another application, People Power, users can interface with their homes using an iPhone or computer to adjust plug loads, see which plugs are being used, etc. “These are essentially micro smart grids,” explain Thomson. Both People Power and ProjectFrog are being developed by programmers with traditional skills.

So, does specializing in green technology limit IT professionals in any way? On the subject of job security and growth in the green IT job market, Naquin had these thoughts: “IT has and will continue to be a major cost center for every kind of organization and industry. Building skills that improve efficiency from any angle will make a candidate more marketable and ultimately employable. Skills that are in demand are those that can identify and demonstrate improvements in efficiencies, whether in the development or management of IT.  Employers are specifically interested in any that impact cost and/or improve the life cycle management of IT resources for an organization.”

Naquin isn’t the only one who has a positive outlook for green IT professions. Mary Vincent, founder of Green Star Solution (an organization working on green tech innovation) and co-founder of the Green Software Unconference) suggests, “International, governmental, and company regulations and policies are driving many software opportunities, including carbon accounting software.”

Several institutions are in the process of developing green-focused IT programs. The GTA is working on professional certification programs by functional area, but the programs are not scheduled to roll out until sometime in late 2011. The Software Engineering Institute of CarnegieMellon is also researching smart grid technology and working on energy issues using the Smart Grid Maturity Model (SGMM). Additionally, UT-Dallas is making plans to develop an interdisciplinary research center, though this won’t likely be launched for several semesters.

Though the way is not clear cut, with or without these specialized programs students interested in the intersection between technology and clean energy should be able to find their way to a fulfilling career. And though the future looks bright for this sector, our experts seem confident that even those who specialize should fare well should the green IT market fall flat. Prakash says, “When I look at an IT professional who specializes in green energy, they’ll still have done the basic courses in software engineering, etc. They would be easily able to retool and move to other areas.”

Spending time outdoors and learning about nature as a child was instrumental for me in developing my passion for the natural world. Since November 1, 2009 National Wildlife Federation has helped 80,000 youth connect with the natural world and build their own conservation interests through our Eco-Schools USA program. Through this program 185 schools have developed programs on energy and water conservation, waste recycling, school grounds greening and more.

Given that the typical child today spends more than seven hours in front of a screen and less than four minutes outdoors in instructured play, Eco-Schools is an important way to help kids better understand the natural world and foster a love of nature which will be essential for tomorrow’s conservation leaders. If you would like to help green a school for a child in your life and build the next generation of conservationists, go to www.ecoschoolsusa.org.