Hamilton College just got a little greener this month.
Building Dashboard®, a new website developed by the software company Lucid Design Group, charts in real-time the amount of electricity expended in more than a dozen campus buildings, including the Blood Fitness Center, McEwen Dining Hall, Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts, and seven residence halls––Babbitt, Milbank, Major, Minor, McIntosh, Kirkland and Wertimer. A special page displays water and natural gas use in the Science Center.
Frank Marsicane, Hamilton’s Associate Director of Physical Plant, believes that “making the campus aware of how much energy we use should help reduce our consumption,” according to an August 28th press release. Importantly, the Dashboard meets one of the college’s key environmental sustainability goals: “Develop programs to raise awareness and encourage conservation by all members of the community [and] provide tools and incentives for conservation efforts,” the school’s “Sustainability” website states.
Each monitored building is embedded with a sensor that gauges the amount of power being consumed and then transmits that data to a central server, which stores and uploads the information onto the Building Dashboard web page (http://buildingdashboard.com/clients/hamilton/) “all within a minute of being collected,” according to the site.
By clicking on the “Electricity” icon, community members can view each building’s total electricity consumption in kilowatt-hours, in addition to its average rate of consumption. Within this same section, the “Viewpoint” tab allows visitors to tailor the data per person and per 1000 square feet and compare energy usage between two campus buildings of choice. The “Timescale” tab shows the cumulative amount of electricity consumed in the past day, week, month or year. Through the “Unit equivalent” tab, visitors can convert the kilowatt-based data to equivalent dollars, pounds of carbon dioxide or coal, gallons of gasoline, hours of laptop and compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulb use, and miles driven in a hybrid car.
The electricity conversion feature electrifies Peter Cannavò, Assistant Professor of Government who teaches in the Environmental Studies program.
“I think that seeing one’s energy use in numbers––and, perhaps even better, in tangible equivalents like miles driven––encourages one to conserve,” Cannavò told The Spectator. “My wife Helen and I bought a Prius this past spring, and the ongoing mileage estimate has made us drive much more efficiently in terms of fuel consumption.”
Cannavò also discussed the academic possibilities that Building Dashboard raises:
“The Dashboard will [be] an excellent teaching tool that I can use in my intro environmental politics class. It enables students to learn a number of things about energy consumption––variation along time of day, equivalences among energy-consuming activities, [and so forth]. We can also analyze and discuss the usefulness of the Dashboard itself as the kind of tool that might affect energy and other resource consumption.”
Associate Professor of Biology William Pfitsch plans to incorporate the new web tool in his “Society and the Environment” class, which usually culminates in a final group project on some aspect of Hamilton’s environmental footprint.
“The Building Dashboard site . . . has great potential,” Pfitsch admitted to The Spectator. “I’m sure that it can be tweaked to provide even more information. I’ll use it in ‘Society and the Environment’ in some form––probably as an ongoing assignment rather than final project, although the database should allow students to explore a variety of interesting questions regarding energy use. Hopefully it will inspire energy and carbon footprint awareness on campus.”
Hamilton’s Environmental Action Group (HEAG) hopes to energize the campus about energy conservation by utilizing Building Dashboard to fuel a campus-wide contest.
“HEAG is planning on using the energy dashboard to create an energy competition between dorms,” HEAG Co-President Jeremy Gleason revealed to The Spectator. “The competition will use the Dashboard to evaluate which dorm has the lowest per capita energy usage, and that dorm will then receive a big prize. That project is forthcoming in the fall semester. HEAG hopes that the competition will encourage Hamilton students to use energy more efficiently.”
In fact, Oberlin College in Ohio, another Building Dashboard client, launched “the first real-time, web-based dorm energy and water use competitions in the U.S.,” according to the Lucid Design Group’s website. Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University also have buildings monitored by Building Dashboard.
Soon, the Outdoor Leadership Center, the newly renovated Kirner-Johnson building and the windmill on the south side of campus will be added to the Dashboard; in addition to tallying the total amount of energy consumed by KJ and the Outdoor Leadership Center, the site will record the amount of energy generated by solar panels that are currently being installed in those buildings.
Thanks to the new web-based technology, tracking the college’s carbon footprint has never been this easy.
