Energetic Conservation

The cost of the College's fuel oil has risen 700 per cent since 1972, and last year Dartmouth spent a staggering $3,130,252 on energy supplies. That's over $700 per student. However it could have been worse. Energy would have cost $920 per student were it not for the serious conservation efforts made in recent years.

Dartmouth's big push to reduce energy consumption began in 1976, when President Kemeny called for a broad-based effort in that direction. That year, the ' College purchased its Honeywell Delta 1000 Central Environmental Control System to monitor and control the heating and ventilation of College buildings. The first phase of this ambitious project cost $315,000 but it has already saved over $500,000.

Implementing the wisdom of the machine has fallen, of course, to the lot of Buildings & Grounds personnel, who have in the past four years accomplished a great many things. They have lowered thermostat settings in classrooms and offices, replaced many energy-wasteful incandescent lights with flourescent, sodium, or metal halide fixtures, and installed automatic timer switches on lights in some classrooms and parts of Baker Library. They have put extra insulation into attics and hung false ceilings in high-roofed rooms, modified toilets and shower heads in dormitories to save water, and installed heat-recovery devices in Thayer's kitchens to stop the profligate pumping of waste heat outdoors.

This year's big effort is buttoning up the windows in some 35 buildings, because this year the cost of installing storm windows ($70-$ 100 a window) was offset enough by the cost of fuel oil (almost $30 a barrel) to make the window project satisfy the College's major energy-conservation criterion: a project must be able to produce savings great enough to pay for itself completely within five years.

Next year's project just might be a refuse-burning steam generator. At least, that's what the members of the Environmental Policy Formulation class (ES/PS 50) have recommended. The class spent the spring term examining the feasibility of constructing such a thing at Dartmouth, and, according to their report ("Energy From Refuse: A Proposal for the Upper Valley"), 90 per cent of the Upper Valley's solid waste could be burned in such a generator to provide Dartmouth with 60 per cent of its steam needs, which would save the College well over $1 million annually. Refuse would burn cleaner than oil, claims the report, and solve a lot of local landfill problems to boot.