Going Green

These days, everyone talks about "going green." But that's not easy to do in a big city, on a campus built over forty years. The Center's Board of Trustees recently convened a "Going Green Task Force" to address the many challenges and opportunities on our urban campus.

In recent years, we have raised student awareness by weighing our trash, issuing reuseable beverage bottles, holding an annual display of everyday green products, and planting gardens on our roof!

Now we are researching ways to have a bigger impact. Ways such as reusing the water that we pump from the high water table on which our campus sits. And we're looking at the one roof without a playground to see if solar panels would work.

Going Green is here to stay. And so is this web page. So stop here often to find out how The Center takes seriously its responsibility to our environment. And while you're at it, give us your suggestions for greening CEE's campus.

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Interactive Weather Station Arrives

This week you may have noticed what looks like a propeller standing atop campus. Rest assured: building B isn’t preparing to fly away!

It’s only our new weather station. Complete with a wind turbine, solar panel, and human-powered hand crank, it’s the next step toward greening the CEE.

A big part of going green is educating our students about energy use, so we’ve designed the station to be fully interactive. Easy-to-read gauges show the number of volts produced by the wind turbine and solar panel. When children turn the hand crank and see how many volts of energy they’re creating, it helps put into perspective just what kind of power we can harness from renewable resources!

Water conservation tool

The weather station will also play an integral role in determining how we use water on campus. “If it’s raining, the weather station will talk to the solar panels on our awnings, which send a signal to water valves, telling them not to turn on,” says Matt Riddle, Lead Facilities Manager at the CEE. “The solar panel also eliminates the need for a battery, which means that the weather station is self-sustaining.”

Energy produced by the wind turbine and solar panel spins corresponding discs (left). Color-coded conduits connect to voltage gauges (right) for easy reading. The human-powered hand crank is accessed from the opposite side of the tower.

Posted by Brooks.Heintzelman on Friday November, 18, 2011 at 03:24PM

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