Search: Student Projects, Sustainable Living

In addition to the Blackout Battles which swapped about 1,500 bulbs of campus residents each year resulting in an estimated reduction in energy use of 8%, the program offers an Energy 101 DECal course with a 30 student enrollment (teaching students to conduct an energy audit of their residence hall). Other projects to be continued are installation on campus vending machines of “vending misers” which save about $5,500 every year, and Shut-the-Sash educational campaigns by placing stickers on Tan Hall and Birge Hall fume hoods in research labs. Next they plan to launch a network-based power management project to remotely manage the power savings modes (e.g., “sleep”) of campus PC computers. The Green Campus Program was started by the non-profit Alliance to Save Energy which receives grants from PG&E.

The initiative will be started by developing a comprehensive set of tools that researchers can take advantage of to minimize the impact (reduce the “footprint”) of their research activities on the local and global environment, starting with a set of core sustainability principles and a website with a comprehensive list of existing resources on the Berkeley campus and tips on how to “Green Your Lab” and “Offset Research Travel.” At UC Berkeley, more than $500 million of extramural research activities are conducted annually

This student group will use $1,000 to implement an electricity use awareness campaign, using guerrilla signs and displaying energy usage data online and on existing computer screens in the elevator waiting areas. The other $1,000 will be used to recycle still usable architectural supplies, now thrown out at the end of the semester by students under pressure to vacate studios, so these supplies can now be given to next semester’s incoming architectural students free of charge. This project hopes to take advantage of “the efforts of Paul Black as he works to install real time energy monitoring systems into more and more buildings on campus” or it may come from a novel system designed to automatically process webcam images of the building electric meter made available via the building wireless network, or it may have to come from direct observations of studio light levels or electricity meters. Because student’s major reviews occur at the end of the semester, with only a short time in which to clean out the studio, lots of still usable architectural supplies, including old models, printouts, and assorted materials, are currently trashed at the end of the semester by outgoing students required to leave the studios clean. These materials can now be recycled in large bins to be available free of charge to next semester’s students.