 An
on-campus energy conservation team suggested new ways to
reduce Appalachian State University’s energy bill.
Last year, Appalachian State spent approximately $75 million
on state-owned buildings, Director of Budget Betsy P. Payne
said. North Carolina owns buildings such as the John E. Thomas
building and the D.D. Dougherty Administration building.
Other campus buildings, such as residence halls and Plemmons
Student Union, cost approximately $6 million.
“We
were looking for low-cost, high-payback energy measures that
could be done, things that could be done that wouldn’t
take much to implement,” associate professor Jeffery
S. Tiller said.
Tiller is a member of the on-campus Conservation Awareness
Team that investigated campus buildings to see where energy
could be conserved.
Problems the team investigated included lighting in unoccupied
rooms, ventilation, and heating and cooling systems.
Tiller said the team focused on lighting.
“We found that there were a lot of lights left on that
didn’t need to be on,” he said.
Tiller said measures were being taken to reduce lighting
costs by encouraging students, faculty and staff to turn
off lights when leaving a room.
New technologies include occupancy-sensors. The sensors would
detect when a room is empty and automatically turn off the
lights. Lights would come back on when someone enters, he
said.
“It’s used a lot in some countries and some areas,
but not so much here. It can be a little awkward sometimes
when the lights go off when you’re not really expecting
them to,” Tiller said.
Tiller said another way to save energy is to reduce the amount
of heat used in buildings by turning down the thermostat.
“If we dropped a degree in temperatures in buildings,
we could save 3 to 5 percent in energy bills,” Tiller
said.
Tiller said the recent budget cuts may have hindered the
university from buying all the new technologies, but it also
may have helped his project by making the state look at ways
to save money on their energy bills.
“Obviously, we can’t get as much money as we
wanted … but on the other hand, we might not have been
doing the effort,” he said.
The administration is behind the effort, Tiller said.
“They’ve (the administration) really been very
helpful and have generated lots of new ideas,” he said.
“There’s a lot of commitment both in terms of
financially and in terms of saving energy is a good thing.”
Russell McCoy said measures have been taken to “centralize”
the control of the university’s building temperatures,
as opposed to going to the buildings themselves.
Temperatures would be changed in accordance with the outside
weather, he said.
Heating and cooling systems in older buildings are also going
to be renovated, McCoy said.
The changes come in response to a plan laid out by N.C. Governor
Mike Easley, called the Utility Savings Initiative. The plan
seeks to reduce the state’s energy bills by $7 to $9
million.
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