Education

 

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) estimate that “school districts nationwide spend over $6 billion each year on energy, second only to salaries.”

 

According to the findings of the DOE collected through their Energy Star program, school districts nationwide have the potential to “improve their energy efficiency and lower their energy bills by 30 percent or more” through cost effective improvements to existing facilities. 1 Consequently, improvements in energy efficiency have the potential to yield significant monetary savings in the overall costs of delivering quality education. These energy cost savings are funds that could be better reallocated to activities and supplies that support improvements to educational activities.

 

Educational facilities from colleges to grade schools are finding that they can achieve significant cost savings as well as reduce their carbon footprint by implementing a few key sustainable measures that range from lighting retrofits to “green” roofs.

 

As an example, Olympic College in Washington state expects its power consumption to drop by more than 813,000 kilowatt hours per year, while reducing the school’s carbon emissions by 544 tons after it completes its lighting upgrade and retrofit at all three of its campuses.

 

The school expects to offset more than half of the cost of the project through a $226,000 rebate from Puget Sound Energy, according to the article. In addition, the school estimates a savings of nearly $5,000 per month in electricity costs on the three campuses.

 

The project, include the replacement of current HID lights in parking lots with more efficient fluorescent bulbs. The school will also replace current 32-watt LED lights with smaller 28-watt bulbs, T-12 fluorescent bulbs with more efficient T-8s and use one of the newest technologies in the lighting industry, T-5 bulbs.