Dominion Foundation provides $100,000 for innovative campus-wide energy monitoring system
August 1, 2008
The Dominion Foundation has awarded $100,000 to the University of Richmond to purchase and install an energy monitoring system in all 14 campus residence halls.
Richmond will be the first college in Virginia to use the Campus Resource Monitoring System, a web-based hardware and software system designed to encourage student energy conservation by making them aware of how much energy they use. A petition with 1,000 student signatures requesting increased sustainability efforts on campus supported the project.
"We knew our students were interested in sustainability, but we had to figure out how to motivate them to conserve electrical energy," said Steve Nash, journalism professor at the university. "The problem is that you can't easily see how much electricity you're using, so you're not aware of when you're wasting it. This system makes it highly visible, and presents the data in an engaging way."
"This contribution will help the University tap the ingenuity of its students and harness their commitment to using energy wisely to help reduce costs across the campus," said William C. Hall Jr., Dominion vice president-Corporate Communications and president of the Dominion Foundation. "This program fits well with Dominion's aggressive energy conservation initiatives."
"The university also will use this as a diagnostic tool to verify how much energy we are saving," said George Souleret, UR campus engineer. The system, created by Lucid Design, Inc., will display students' per-capita and dorm-by-dorm energy use on an "energy dashboard," projected on three large screens in public areas on campus. The data is presented using bar charts showing how much money is spent and pollution generated when electricity is wasted.
The system is scheduled to be installed by fall 2009, when dorm residents will compete for the highest decrease in energy use. At Oberlin College, students were able to reduce their electricity use by up to 55 percent over two weeks.
The Dominion Foundation will award approximately $20 million to more than 1,100 nonprofit organizations in 26 states and the District of Columbia this year, primarily to organizations in Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and other states where Dominion operates power stations, natural gas and other energy facilities.
Dominion is one of the nation's largest producers of energy, with a portfolio of approximately 26,500 megawatts of generation. Dominion serves retail customers in 11 states. For more information about Dominion, visit the company's Web site at www.dom.com.