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Environmental Studies Department |
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Macalester's Energized Campus
In this report we will examine several of the manners that people at Macalester consume energy. We will discuss the manners that heat energy, electricity, and transportation energy uses reflect personal lifestyle and the extent to which these uses have fluctuated over the last several years. As this audit represents the second annual study of energy at Macalester, we will also examine what, if any, changes have been made since the last report and what efforts are currently in place to reduce the use of energy at Macalester. Within this study we will analyze not only the raw figures of energy consumption but move deeper into issues which relate personal and administrative habits with the amount of energy used on campus. The final aspect of this report will concern alternatives to the current energy dependencies which exist at Macalester. We will discuss the feasibility of using other energy sources; moving away from natural gases, coal, and oil toward other potential supplies such as wind or solar. We will consider the question of alternative energy through both environmental and economic studies. In considering factors of cost and efficiency involved with alternative energy sources we will discuss the administration’s position toward a more sustainable energy foundation. Heating The use of energy for heat at Macalester is essential. Macalester’s location in the interior of the northern United States contributes to a climate of harsh long winters. Because it is nearly impossible to eliminate the need for heat energy completely, it is of great importance that this energy should be maximized. In the last few years there have been several projects undertaken by the Macalester Physical plant which attempt to maximize heating efficiency. Many of the new buildings on campus have been build with energy efficiency in mind. The newest dorm, George Draper Dayton, was constructed to allow the most individual control of internal heating. The new Campus Center and the revised Olin Rice complex also incorporate energy saving measures. These building have heat exchangers which, when circulating air throughout the building, use the existing internal air to help heat the incoming air, thereby required less energy to heat cold air. There has also been a slight effort to increase the number of thermostats in academic buildings. With additional thermostats, individual classrooms can monitor their own heat thus eliminating the need to overheat the entire building. However, few buildings currently have this feature, and when buildings are remodeled the administration often puts preferences on the aesthetics of the rooms instead of energy efficiency. Therefore, solid oak cabinets might receive preference over temperature control. Most every dorm room, however, has the ability to adjust the temperature individually. Residential Halls like Dupre have baseboard radiators that allow residents to control the temperature of their own rooms, again abolishing the need to have the entire building highly heated. These features provide some means of energy savings, but Macalester still spends a great deal of money and natural resources on heating each building. The heating uses have differed only slightly in the last ten years. Macalester College typically consumes between 6 billion and 7 billion BTUs each year according to the 1999-2000 Energy Report. It is difficult to compare heat use year to year at Macalester because a great extent of the heating need is determined by the severity of the winter. Longer, colder winters are going to require a greater use of heating energy than mild winters in order to maintain a consistent level of comfort. Also because Macalester has been continually demolishing and constructing buildings, it is troublesome to try and perform a straight year to year energy use comparison. Even with Macalester’s persistent need for the burning of natural resources in order to provide heat, physical plant attempts to chose the least pollution energy source. However, in years when these cleaner oils become expensive, as demonstrated during the current year, the college switches to the most economical heating fuel (Bergstrom). Despite current efforts undertaken by departments or individuals at Macalester to reduce or conserve heating energy use, there are several other steps that could be considered. As Macalester College continues to build or remodel current structures, they should make high quality insulation a priority. Additionally, they should focus more attention on installing individual temperature controls than on adding superfluous amenities. The final step Macalester College could take to lower both their own financial costs of heating and the environmental strain is to decrease the standard temperature in buildings during the winter. This action is perhaps the most difficult because it requires a change in personal habit. However, it is not fundamentally necessary for members of the Macalester community to wear tee-shirts indoors in the middle of January. If each building was kept only slightly cooler in the winter, it could provide substantial economic and environmental savings. Electricity Electricity use at Macalester is an important issue as students and faculty constantly relay on a limitless supply of energy to meet their daily needs. Consequently, little thought is given to personal habits that lead to over consumption of electricity. Common habits such as leaving dorm and classroom lights on, and personal computers and stereos running while nobody is present are common practices that waste energy on a daily basis. Greater awareness by the student body and faculty could save thousands of dollars worth of electricity every month, simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the consumption of natural resources. However, many electrical needs are relatively inflexible for a variety of reasons. Safety and security issues, such as adequate campus lighting at night and sufficient air ventilation in dorms and academic buildings, are necessary energy costs that cannot be altered in the short-run. Also, electricity is convenient, if not necessary, for completing many daily tasks. However, from an efficiency standpoint, the Macalester community should strive to eliminate excessive electricity costs. In recent years, a significant trend has been seen in the rapid increase in personal energy consumption. Students today are far more technologically reliant than students fifteen years ago. Personal computers are perhaps the greatest contributor to this trend. However, study habits of students today have also contributed to this tendency. On any given night, students occupy most academic buildings, often working until early in the morning, and keeping departments and labs open far later into the night than even a decade ago (Bergstrom). Further, there are only a handful of students keeping each respective building open. An obvious solution to this problem that needs to be explored is the possibility of centralizing night activities. Instead of keeping all building open until 10 or midnight, simply one or two buildings could supply adequate workspace for the night-hawks. A recurring suggestion, that was relayed to us in our interview with David Bergstrom, was a campus-wide forum and energy awareness campaign that would reinforce conservation values and help to change wasteful personal habits. Simple poster campaigns, informative e-mailing, or replacing the “turn off this light when you leave” stickers on light switches could make a measurable difference. As overconsumption is not the intent of the student body, but simply results from lack of awareness, prioritizing responsible energy use as a campus goal could greatly reduce energy costs. Figure 1: Figure 1 yields insight to the distribution of electrical energy use at Macalester for the 1999-2000 academic year. Olin-Rice is the largest academic building and accounts for over 20% of all electricity use at Macalester. In addition to its large size, Olin-Rice also contains all of the physical science departments. These departments are technology reliant and also require significant ventilation for safety, increasing electrical consumption. The library is another building that uses a large share of campus electricity at 8.5% of the total. However, it is important to note that the Library was just retrofitted with new lighting to save costs, and several other campus buildings have been adjusted or built to function at an efficient level. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this table is seen in the last column, titled “Chiller”. This is the annual cost of Air Conditioning on Campus and is equal to over 9.5% of all electricity consumption. This is a huge number, considering that roughly half of campus buildings are air-conditioned and Macalester is located in a frigid climate. No air conditioning is generally needed from November through March and campus activity is limited in the summer, so it is questionable why this level is so high. Information concerning building efficiency is illustrated in Figure 2, where we divided annual energy use by square footage. It is important to note that some of the highest levels seen in Stadium, Kagin, and the Art Lights and Power Plant are all very high because they provide services (campus lighting and cooking) in addition to traditional building use. For this reason, they should be ignored. This graph is important because it allows for comparability among buildings of different size. We see that there is a much more even energy distribution per unit area. It is interesting to note that the dorms, where a dense population of students live, use relatively low energy compared to other campus buildings. Figure 2: Transportation Macalester is predominately a residential campus with most students living in the dorms. Even those students with off campus housing tend to live in the surrounding neighborhoods, as Macalester is located in a residential neighborhood in Saint Paul. There is also substantial housing for Macalester faculty and staff in the environs. However, despite its location, the Macalester Physical Plant issues a number of parking permits to students, faculty, and staff, allowing them to use the parking lots on campus. For the 2000-2001 academic year physical plant issued 780 faculty/staff permits, approximately 250 off campus student permits and 210 on campus student permits. Unfortunately these were the only numbers that we could ascertain during this examination.1 It is difficult to hypothesize how many of these permits are used each day as faculty members with multiple cars are allowed multiple permits even though they would only use one each day. The number of off campus students with permits also does not completely represent the number of daily drivers, as many of these students may alternate between days they drive and days they walk or bike to campus. However, despite the problems with these figures they do offer a general idea of automobile use in a small college located in a metropolis. Of the on campus population, approximately 1175 students, only 210 obtained a parking permit. Conversely, of the less than 700 off campus students nearly 250 requested a permit. While these figures alone do not represent a great deal, in the context of their use, they demonstrate the gasoline used by the Macalester community. We approximated that on average, the off-campus students live one half mile from campus. Using this estimate, we hypothesized that students drive to campus on average once a day, making their round trip one mile just going to and from campus. If we assume that on average 250 off campus students drive to and from Macalester daily (realizing that not all students may use their permits daily, it is still appropriate to keep the average at 250 since many off campus students who drive do not have a permit) then each week off campus students alone drive 1750 miles or 52,500 miles during the school year. The fact that so many Macalester off campus students have cars, is more a factor of the transportation facilities available in the city than the efforts by the college. For many students the bus system does not work easily into their own schedules. The severely cold winters can also influence some students decisions to drive to campus when they might otherwise walk or bike. In order to reduce the number of off campus students who drive to campus, Macalester’s Residential Life office could make more of an effort to aid in student’s searches to find housing close to campus. Macalester could also create programs that encourage carpooling for students who do need to drive to the college. Alternative Energy Sources The student body at Macalester College is largely environmentally conscious to some degree. It thereby becomes necessary to analyze how we practice our beliefs. The current state of energy use at Macalester has already been examined, and changing personal habits to conserve energy is possibly the most important goal that the Macalester community should strive to meet. However, responsible energy usage also concerns our energy sources. Currently, Macalester receives electricity from Excel Energy and a coal-burning power plant, while natural gas is burned on-campus for heat. It is the purpose of this section to comprehensively analyze alternative sources of energy that are more environmentally responsible. As natural gas is a relatively clean burning fuel, we will focus on electricity sources. The problem with a coal-burning power plant is the emission of greenhouse gases. A feasible alternative energy source must have environmental advantages as well as competitive costs. Solar energy, the process of harvesting energy from the sun and converting it into electricity is one possible alternative. The benefit of using solar energy revolves around eliminating greenhouse emissions. Further, the cost of using solar energy is minimal after the initial installment of panels, only covering maintenance costs. To research this issue, we spoke with Professor James Doyle of the Physics Department. He explained to us how solar energy is processed and attempted to estimate the cost of producing equivalent amounts of electricity to Macalester’s current consumption. Ultimately, we found that implementing a solar energy program at Macalester is completely infeasible. Space at Macalester is at a premium, and expanding the size of campus dramatically to install fields of solar panels is politically and financially impossible. Second, Minnesota’s sunlight is highly restricted. During the winter, during long stretches of cloudy days with limited sunlight hours, solar energy would be a difficult energy source of which to relay. Additionally, year round weather variability could result in often and unexpected stretches with insufficient energy to meet campus demands. Dr. Doyle estimated the total cost and area needed to provide solar cells that would meet all of Macalester’s electrical needs. Based on commercially available solar panels, he found that in order to generate 13 million KWH’s per year, it would cost roughly $36 million and cover an area of approximately 720,000 square feet (20 football fields). Narrowing this estimate to the energy required to support Olin Rice, he found that it would cost about $8 million, covering an area the size of four football fields. From this information, it is clear that solar energy is not an option for alternative energy. However, Professor Doyle did suggest the possibility of receiving funding to install a few solar cells. This could be done as a research experiment conducted at Macalester, while raising community awareness about alternative energy sources. A more popular form of solar energy use in the United States is known as partial-solar. Essentially, it uses sunlight to heat water, by concentrating light on pipes or containers. Once again this method of solar energy is infeasible at Macalester as the bulk of the school year falls in the colder months. Dr. Doyle also explained that nuclear fusion, while still in its infant state, could provide unlimited and environmentally safe electricity in the future. However, we find this idea rather difficult to believe, as this form of energy is far from ready for commercial use. It is somewhat futile to estimate the efficiency of this energy source as there are bound to be hidden costs, both financially and environmentally. The idea of an electricity source that is “too cheap to meter” has already failed miserably in the nuclear energy industry. Perhaps the most promising form of alternative energy is wind-power. Recent development in windmill technology has dramatically increased the feasibility of this resource. The price of wind energy has become highly competitive with other sources and its popularity continues to rise. In fact, costs have declined by roughly 80% since 1980. Once again we are confronted with the obstacle of Macalester’s urban location, but this energy source is much more difficult to disregard than solar energy. Although Macalester could not implement an alternative energy program under current conditions, wind energy is a valid large-scale alternative to coal, nuclear and hydroelectric power. Currently, alternative energy use at Macalester does not show extensive promise. However, the future may convey a different story. Macalester should place a strong commitment on responsible energy use and investigating alternative energy sources is an important step in the right direction. After examining energy use at Macalester through its heating, electricity, and transportation, we found a variety of options to reduce energy consumption. A shift in personal habits constitute the most substantial method of reducing energy use. For this reason we found that there is a severe lack of awareness and individual attention to the problem of over consumption. The efforts made by the physical plant and the college administration in the last several years to create more energy efficient buildings only begins to address the larger concerns. There have also been little noticeable differences made since the last energy audit. While physical plant staff might discuss the possibility of initiating a council to study energy use and promote energy responsibility, no such measures have begun within the last year. The college’s immediate reaction to switch from cleaner natural gases to cheaper heating sources demonstrates the school’s priority on economics and not the environment. The college still operates under the mentality of unlimited energy resources which often prompts decisions to be made which sacrifice energy reduction in favor of unnecessary expenditures. Bibliography of Works Consults
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1Information concerning the make and model of the cars was not available to us. |
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