Editor’s note: This commentary is by Norm Etkind, who is the director of the School Energy Management Program at the Vermont Superintendents Association.
[I] was attending an energy forum in a conference room at the convention center in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The year was 2009. The panel up front was comprised of the top echelon of the worldwide Association of Energy Engineers.
When they opened the forum to questions, I asked, “Here we are meeting under the largest roof-top solar array in the United States in a room lit with energy intensive incandescent lights developed in the 1800s and inefficient t-12 fluorescent lights. How do we get energy efficiency the recognition it deserves when all are focused on the latest, hottest technologies?” They chuckled a bit in recognition of the widely acknowledged problem but had few answers. They’re engineers after all, not politicians or marketing experts.
Fast forward to 2015. It seems every solar array installed in Vermont gets extensive press coverage and ribbon cuttings with politicians and smiling faces. In contrast, a press release was recently distributed to describe the dramatic results of years of efforts to improve the energy efficiency of Vermont’s public schools. As far as I know, no Vermont media saw fit to cover this story. Energy efficiency is clearly boring.
The press release explained how a statistically valid random sample of 80 Vermont schools were put under the microscope to determine their level of energy efficiency. Energy Star scores were obtained using federal EPA methodology. The results were eye-opening. While the U.S. median Energy Star score for schools is 50 out of 100 and schools can achieve the Energy Star designation with a score of 75, Vermont school’s median score was 90.
But energy efficiency is anything but boring. It is instead the most essential element in cost-effectively addressing our energy needs.
The lack of interest in this story is despite the fact that energy efficiency is arguably the most important energy source we have. It doesn’t utilize our mountaintops, it doesn’t spread across our fields, it doesn’t dam our rivers and flood the plains, it doesn’t involve massive importation of equipment from foreign lands, no coal is burned, oil imported, or nuclear waste generated.
The improvement in our school’s energy efficiency, instead, is the result of a lot of hard work on the part of school personnel and administrators with the support of their school boards and local voters. Facility operations at our schools have improved and, with the support of Efficiency Vermont, most electrical systems have been upgraded.
Electrical use in the study schools was reduced by 20 percent over the last eight years. A lot of money was saved and our production of greenhouse gases was reduced. In Vermont, all the windmills, photovoltaics and methane generation installed to date account for only 13 percent of our electrical needs.
There remains significant work to be performed to improve the building envelope, controls and heating systems at our schools. This is very hard to accomplish given the pressure on school budgets, the end of school construction aid (suspended since 2007) and the lack of programmatic support.
But energy efficiency is anything but boring. It is instead the most essential element in cost-effectively addressing our energy needs. Much more can be accomplished at our schools if supportive programs were put in place to help them get this work done.
To raise awareness, we need to lift energy efficiency to its proper place in public discourse.
