Barnard Tests Energy-Saving Gear

Barnard is about to get a little bit greener.
In an e-mail sent out last Tuesday, Barnard Residential Life and Housing announced plans to work with Con Edison and Brooklyn-based technology start-up EnergyHub in a pilot program to make selected student suites and faculty residences more energy-efficient.

Next month, eight participating Barnard suites will have an EnergyHub monitoring system, consisting of smart outlets, power strips, and a touchscreen “dashboard” installed in their rooms. The system will measure the electricity being used by each outlet and send a report to a user-friendly interface. The dashboard will adapt to the resident’s schedule so that energy is not wasted when nobody is home.

With a more comprehensive understanding of how much and where energy is being used in their suites, residents can adjust their habits accordingly. According to EnergyHub, electricity bills do not provide enough detailed information to the consumer.

“One number a month with a dollar sign is not enough for someone to understand their energy consumption,” said Stephan von Muehlen, design director and co-founder of EnergyHub.

A significant volume of electricity can be saved, explained von Muehlen, through a combination of automatic shut-off capabilities and detailed information about each individual outlet.

EnergyHub was founded about a year and a half ago with the goal of reducing energy costs in each residence by twenty percent.

“Barnard College is sort of a perfect place to do one of our first test installations—it’s here in New York and there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm from the students and the administration,” von Muehlen said.
While Con Edison and EnergyHub stand to gain from the opportunity to conduct research, Barnard College will also benefit from this partnership. “We’re always talking about ways that we can be more energy smart,” said Annie Aversa, director of Barnard Residential Life and Housing. The installation of the EnergyHub system, she explained, will hopefully be able to lower costs, educate residents, and make the participating suites greener.

Residential Life and Housing plans to keep the systems in place for one calendar year and then examine results to measure the success of the program. Although the program is formally scheduled to end after the evaluation is complete, ResLife hopes to work with the EcoReps, a pro-environment Barnard group, to see how this data can be applied more broadly on the Barnard campus.

The initial student feedback, said Aversa, has been very enthusiastic. Within two days of Tuesday’s e-mail, all of the eight slots had been filled by interested suites.