Sustainability on Campus and the Hidden Cost of Energy

Customized Syllabus for Liam Willoughby

ENVS 4950 Integrative Seminar in Environmental Studies, ETSU, Spring 2019

Last Updated: February 10, 2019

Mission Statement

The ever occurring costs of energy to power a house or a college campus are not realized unless you are the one seeing the financial statement and paying those bills. I will be working with the Sustainability department, within Facilities Management on ETSU campus, to learn and study the over head costs of individual buildings on campus as well as what time of energy that building uses, whether it is natural gas, coal, or solar. I have been assigned to study the library and determine how much energy the building uses by counting computers, lights, and other electronics, determining how much electricity they use, and see how much the solar panel offsets the building overall. I plan to learn a lot about the whole process of trying to reduce emissions on a college campus and see ways to implement it into other areas of life.

Additional Texts

1. Energy: A Human History. Simon & Schuster, 2018. 464 pages.

2. To be determined...

Service Placement

Facility Management Department – Sustainability

ETSU Campus

Supervisor: Kathleen Moore, ETSU Director of Sustainability, moore@mail.etsu.edu

I will continue to meet with the sustainability department and see how they make decisions on what is the most important to address and how they can come to these decisions by seeing quantitative costs and data from campus buildings. I will also work on my own library project and create an excel sheet to record my findings. This is an energy audit related to the photovoltaic solar panels recently installed on top of ETSU's Sherrod Library.