 "Photo: Staff")
This fall, the UNH Energy Task Force (ETF), the Office of Sustainability, and the Department of ResLife will be presenting the first ever UNH Energy Waste Watch Challenge. This competition among the student dorms and apartment complexes looks to serve as both a fun challenge for students and an educational opportunity about reducing energy usage.
The Challenge will run from October 25 to November 22 and will happen again from February 9 to March 9. According to program coordinator and graduate student Chris Skoglund, the competition will aim to have residents reduce their current energy and water consumption compared to their building's average usage over the last three years.
"The energy office has individual building meters for all buildings on campus," said Utilities Contract Manager Matt O'Keefe of the UNH Office of Energy. "We get monthly consumption data for water, gas, electricity, and hot water heat. We will be reading these meters for the Waste Watch Challenge to help with the data collection necessary for comparisons to previous years."
Cash prizes will be awarded to the buildings that achieve the greatest reductions in their usage during that period of time. The prize for first place is $300, $200 for second place, and $100 for third place, and will be deposited in the building's general fund to be used at the discretion of the residents.
To help facilitate this competition, Skoglund and other members of the ETF are attempting to recruit "Energy Captains" in each building. ETF member Erin McMyne feels these Energy Captains will be the driving force behind making the competition a success across campus.
"The goal of the Energy Captains will be to help educate those who live in their building on how to change their behavior," said McMyne. "Like, 'Hey, turn off your lights!' or 'Don't leave the water running while your brush your teeth!' And what their impact is when they do make these changes."
The Energy Captains will also work with their residence hall staff to help promote the challenge in the dorms and apartments, serve as a link between the ETF Challenge Subcommittee and the students and spend about three to five hours a week on Challenge-related projects. The Energy Captains will model responsible energy use and will be "the biggest allies" of the effort, according to Skoglund.
Skoglund says that while other colleges have conducted similar energy-saving competitions, this new challenge may be the first of its kind.
"We used some other schools as models for our competition," said Skoglund. "But they were mostly held by student organizations at places like Harvard and Stanford. What we're doing is going to be fully integrated, with the offices of Sustainability, Energy, and ResLife all involved. We wanted to do what fits best at UNH, and what the University values involves energy use."
The building rankings for the challenge will be tabulated by taking the energy usage by each building and dividing by the number of students living there. This will provide a fair competition between buildings of varying sizes and capacities. As Skoglund described, this enables buildings to "compete against themselves."
The Energy Waste Watch Challenge to be held next semester will allow dorms that had a rough start the first time around to try again. "They can learn the material, make connections and take the knowledge they already had from the first competition to do a better job the next time."
Skoglund feels the real goal of the program is to educate students on how to make a lasting influence on energy consumption in their daily lives. "We want to make people aware that a simple choice has impact," said Skoglund. "There are definitely ways that we can change without making major changes in our lives. This program will stress how important it is for young people to make this change now, in a safe place, before going out in the world and hopefully continuing good habits surrounding energy use."
Skoglund and the other coordinators of the event think of the upcoming challenge as a "pilot" and that the success of the program could lead to more energy consumption awareness at UNH. There is hope that more people will become involved and the programs may become institutionalized on campus. The Energy Waste Watch Challenge is attempting to incorporate the successes of other PowerDown programs on campus, and also ties into this year's University Dialogue on Energy.
Students interested in becoming Energy Captains should contact their residence hall director for more information. Skoglund and McMyne both stressed that buildings are allowed to have more than one Energy Captain if desired. The first meeting for Energy Captains will be held Tuesday, September 26th in the Hubbard Hall Rec Lounge from 12:40 to 2 p.m. For more information on the UNH Energy Waste Watch Challenge, as well as tips for how best to reduce everyday energy use in the UNH community, visit http://www.unh.edu/etf/challenge.html.
Be the first to comment on this article!