BioDiesel in the News: Energy prices inspire colleges' ramped-up sustainability efforts

Energy prices inspire colleges’ ramped-up sustainability efforts

NORTHFIELD, Minn. — In the shadow of Carleton College’s majestic wind turbine, Daniel Pulver has cooked up an idea for creating even more renewable energy: turning used cafeteria oil into fuel for cars.

Across town at St. Olaf College, Dayna Burtness has her own project: Growing pesticide-free food for the school cafeteria. In turn, cafeteria waste goes to a composter that will eventually churn out nourishment for the college’s agricultural fields and planting beds.

The projects are just a small slice of increasing efforts nationwide by universities and colleges, large and small, seeking to become more “sustainable” — while saving money.

“I’d do it in a flash just to avoid spending the money on utilities,” said Pete Sandberg, assistant vice president for facilities at St. Olaf College. “Then that money frees up to do what we’re really here for — to teach.”

Besides budget-minded administrators and environmentally aware students, there’s something else behind the green push: good old college rivalry. Many college administrators don’t want to be left behind as they see comparable schools trying new ideas, said Judy Walton, executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

In Northfield, a rural town roughly 40 miles south of the Twin Cities, you can see some of that friendly competition between St. Olaf and Carleton.

The schools in this town of 18,000, including 5,000 college students, are so close that they often compare notes — and that helps spur innovation, said Anthony Cortese, co-founder of a Boston-based group called Second Nature, a leader in the college sustainability effort.

Carleton began operating its own 1.65-megawatt wind turbine in 2004, and St. Olaf is building one of similar size this summer — though plans were in the works before Carleton’s began operating. St. Olaf’s turbine will supply electricity directly to the school, while Carleton sells electricity to a utility company, then buys back what it needs.

Because of Carleton’s arrangement, the “wind turbine is basically a break-even operation,” said Fred Rogers, Carleton’s vice president and treasurer. The turbine has the capacity to produce the equivalent of about 40 percent of the school’s electricity.

St. Olaf’s wind turbine will supply about a third of the school’s electricity needs and is expected to save as much as $300,000 a year, Sandberg said.

“Our utility budgets are just going up year after year, mostly because of natural gas more than electric, but anything we can do to offset that is a great thing,” said Sandberg.

Sandberg said that while Carleton may be ahead of the game on wind energy, St. Olaf is ahead of the curve in composting. The school’s composter, which has been in use since the fall, keeps 3.5 tons of weekly food waste from the area’s landfills, turning it into fertilizer used on campus.

Walton, with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, said more than 600 schools in the United States and Canada have some sort of sustainability effort under way. Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of AASHE, said the number could be well over 1,000 when individual campus greening projects are considered.

“We all feel now that the field is really exploding,” said Walton, citing an upswing in meetings and regional conferences on sustainability. In addition, many schools are now hiring sustainability coordinators, she said.

And more colleges are using wind turbines to rein in energy costs. Of the schools it tracks, AASHE lists nearly 30 colleges with wind turbines.

But other projects vary. Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, has a system to monitor electricity and water use in the school’s dormitories. All the data will eventually be available online and in real time, so students can compare energy consumption in each dorm.

Cochise College in Douglas, Ariz., recently broke ground on a new solar field to help heat and cool parts of the campus. The field, about two-thirds of an acre, will contain rows of solar panels to collect energy from the sun. Annual savings of about $15,000 are expected.

At Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., a $5.7 million co-generation plant is expected to save $870,000 in fossil fuels and electricity. The project includes a gas turbine generator that will produce the college’s electricity and a heat recovery steam generator to capture heat that’s normally wasted.

This month, faculty from Carleton and St. Olaf will hold a professional development workshop where faculty members from both colleges can learn how to incorporate sustainability ideas in their classrooms, whether they’re teaching science, math or any other subject.

Jim Farrell, who teaches environmental studies at St. Olaf and is co-leading the workshop, said students are already using their own campuses as laboratories. In his campus ecology class, students study the St. Olaf campus and then generate ideas to improve sustainability.

At Carleton, assistant philosophy professor Jen Everett said her environmental ethics class gives students the same chance to launch new projects.

“The vision of sustainability in higher education is to make sustainability the foundation of everything we do for education,” Everett said. “We need to graduate students who are going to be radically different kinds of thinkers than we were trained to be.”

Pulver, a 21-year-old senior from Harpswell, Maine, is already thinking differently — proposing that Carleton convert the 1,000 gallons of vegetable oil it throws away every year into biodiesel fuel for on-campus vehicles.

He got the idea in Everett’s class — and mixed his own biodiesel fuel in his kitchen. Pulver will pitch the concept to a school planning committee, and plans to hand the project off to another student when he graduates.

Across the river at St. Olaf, Burtness worked with administrators to set up a student farm on campus. Burtness, a 21-year-old from Coon Rapids, said a summer internship at an organic farm in Wisconsin inspired her. St. Olaf officials were cool at first — until the company that runs the school cafeteria said it would buy the student produce.

Burtness and a fellow student began operating the farm last summer, and in its first year, the farm sold more than $10,000 of fresh produce to the cafeteria, including about 1,100 pounds of summer squash, 590 pounds of brandywine tomatoes, and over 1,000 eggplants and 830 bell peppers.

“In higher education, I think a big problem is that students end up thinking it’s too cerebral,” said Burtness. “The existence of on-campus, real solutions that students can actually get involved with — I think that’s really empowering.”

Carleton College: http://www.carleton.edu

Sustainability efforts at Carleton College: http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/facilities/sustainability/

St. Olaf College: http://www.stolaf.edu

Sustainability efforts at St. Olaf College: http://www.stolaf.edu/green/