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BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published February 7, 2008

The first of the month kicked off the Tri-Co Energy Diet, a competition between Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges to reduce energy consumption between the months of February and November.

The environmental clubs on the respective campuses will be keeping track of the amount of energy used by each dorm, converting it to amount of energy used per student, Kavita Hardy ’08, a member of Earthlust, said.

This data will then be compared to data collected in November (on a per-capita basis), the month chosen as being closest in climate and energy use to February, to determine what percentage of the energy was conserved by each campus. The winning school will receive a $1,500 prize to be spent at the school’s discretion, according to Harvey.

“Our goal is that by the end of the month it will have become habit to turn off the lights when you leave the room and turn off your computer at night and use drying racks,” Hardy said. “To the point that people won’t necessarily revert back to their more inefficient habits.”

Along with the competition between schools, the college is also holding a contest among the dorms on campus. “We’d like to do the dorm vs. dorm so that even if we don’t win [the Tri-Co competition] as a campus, at least the winning dorm can have a pizza party to celebrate their success in saving energy,” Hardy said.

The competition is based on a similar one that took place at Bryn Mawr last spring semester, according to Emily McGlynn, a member of the Bryn Mawr Greens and organizer of last year’s energy diet. “It was really successful last year,” McGlynn said. “A lot of people got really into it. Our goal was to reach five percent saving and we reached nine percent overall. On average each dorm saved 15 percent.”

Because of this tremendous success, the Greens began to develop the idea of having a similar competition but on a much larger scale. “[The Greens] have taken the idea and made it into something so much bigger than I could have imagined,” McGlynn said. “There are so many more activities than last year. They are doing a great job of organizing it.”

Some of the activities taking place on the Bryn Mawr campus include movie showings and speakers.

The Greens are also gathering prizes from local businesses to help motivate students to conserve, according to McGlynn.

Earthlust is also organizing several events during the month to promote the competition, including the Footprint project. “We’re going to ask people to make a tracing or imprint of their foot and have that be symbolic of their carbon footprint and then ask them to sign a pledge to reduce their energy consumption and then display them,” Harvey said.

Earthlust and the Greens are hoping to team up to purchase a bike-powered blender. “We want to hold an event where we make smoothies for the whole campus, but students have to bike their own smoothies,” Harvey said.

Through weekly updates posted in Sharples, students can see how much their dorm has saved and each dorm’s consumption as well as the other schools’, according to Hardy.

Earthlust also hopes to get a link on the Swarthmore Web site dashboard so students can have access to this information anytime.

The data will be monitored with the help of the facilities departments at each of the schools. Each dorm on campus has a meter to track energy consumption and the facilities departments are constantly monitoring that data, according to Hardy.

Unfortunately, since off-campus dorms are not on the same energy grid, those dorms will not be counted as part of the competition. Parrish will also be excluded because of the inability to distinguish between student and administrative uses of energy, Hardy said.

Much like Swarthmore, the Bryn Mawr facilities department is working closely with the Greens not only to monitor the dorms’ energy use but also to make sure students are educated on the proper ways to conserve.

“We want to focus on education as well as the competition,” said Jim McGraffin, the Bryn Mawr engineer who is responsible for the energy program. “We want to teach students how to conserve through the use of technology to promote more efficient use of energy without changing their lifestyles.”

One way in which the facilities department is doing this is by distributing free energy efficient light bulbs, which are equally luminescent while using only one-third the electricity, according to McGaffin.

The Facilities Management Department’s guidance is also necessary after the competition last year at Bryn Mawr got a little out of hand.

“The competition was a great success, but some students were a little too enthusiastic, turning off things that shouldn’t have been turned off,” McGaffin said. For the Tri-Co competition there are more rules and regulations to ensure that everything is fair.

Bryn Mawr’s goal this year is to reduce the school’s total energy use by another two percent, McGaffin said. Although this is an impressive goal, Earthlust has not given up on Swarthmore’s chances of winning.

“Bryn Mawr is going to be very tough competition,” Hardy said. “If we want to beat them, we can; we’re just going to have to make a very conscious effort to reduce our energy.”

The Bryn Mawr facilities department is making the effort well worth it – the money will be coming from a program in which the school sells the energy they are not using back on the free market, according to McGaffin.

“If we make the two percent goal, we will actually save the $1500, the cost of the light bulbs, plus money for photocopies that we helped the Greens with,” McGaffin said. “It is well worth the educational awareness to reinvest the money with the students.”

If Swarthmore wins, the money would be put towards further efforts to save energy by bringing speakers to campus or funding an awareness party or concert, according to Hardy.

“If people think about what they want and if that would motivate them to save energy, let us know,” Hardy said.

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