A Tale of Two Libraries

In terms of energy use, why is old, wasteful Baker tetterthan new, sophisticated Berry?

HOW MANY LIBRARIES does Dartmouth have? Ten. We operate ten separate libraries, with their own staffs and budgets. Quite soon that figure will rise to 11, as new Berry joins old Baker in a vast bookish embrace—and simultaneously becomes cousin to dancing Paddock, hidden Kresge, beautiful Sanborn.

Baker, of course, is by far the most important. It leads in number of books and microtexts, in architectural distinction, in position on campus, in sheer bulk. It-doesn't, however, lead in technology, or, if it does, it won't for much longer. Berry is 70 years younger and will have every modern advantage. Once built, it will instantly take command.

It's fascinating to compare these two libraries: the noble old landmark and the glamorous new high-tech creation. It's specially interesting, to me, to compare them in terms of what planners are increasingly calling sus tainability. To what extent, if any, does Baker and will Berry make its own heat instead of depending on the oil-fired College steam plant? What about electricity? Does fossil fuel have to be burnt to provide eveiy single watt, or can either building make a little clean power itself? How efficiendy will the two halves of Berry-Baker operate?

building makes any of its own heat, at least none that's usable, and neither makes one watt of electricity. But Berry clearly looks more efficient.

It should. There has been a lot of careful planning. In the case of Berry, five groups have taken part. There are the architects at Venturi, Scott, Brown who designed the outside, and die architects at Shepley Bulfinch who designed the inside. There is Bard, Rao & Athanas, the engineering firm that worked out 10,000 details like what wiring goes where, and there is Savage Engineering, which did a peer review of Bard. And, of course, there are Dartmouth's own expert planners.

All these planners, except perhaps Venturi, gave frequent thought to minimizing energy use. For example, Savage went through a long list of what it called Energy Cost Reduction Measures, or ECRMs.

No saving was too small. For only $6,000 you could install carbon dioxide sensors in Berry, and these would control the amount of outside air brought in. They'd save $21,000 a year, which means they have a payback of about three and a half months. Delicious.

A little more expensive: for $24,000 you could have special controls that would do continuous monitoring of the air conditioning; they'd pay for themselves in six months. Berry will be loaded with such technology.

No ECRMs, no peer review. I'll give just one example. Sanborn House, though semi independent, is also one component of Baker—an outlying architectural gem.

Sanborn could provide some of its own heat, but not in a way that would save energy. It happens to contain 14 working, though rarely used, fireplaces. Once when I was chair of English, a man from B & G and I went over the building together. We were both startled to find that not one of these fireplaces had so much as a damper. Every winter, from the year Sanborn was built, 14 columns of heated air had been soaring uselessly into the cold New Hampshire sky. Clearly efficiency did not weigh on anyone's mind when those fireplaces were built. Why would it have? Back then, supplies of everything seemed inexhaustible.

So here they are: beautiful, wasteful Baker, and homely but brilliantly designed Berry. Surely Berry must be closer to sus tainability.

No. As it turns out, brilliantly designed Berry will use far more energy than Baker ever dreamed of. Are you ready for the figures? Prepare to gasp (if you're the gasping type).

Heat first. It costs about $145,000 a year to heat Baker. It's expected to cost $ 185,000 to heat Berry. Maybe Berry is bigger? No, it's smaller. Baker occupies 170,000 square feet, while Berry will add only 154,000 square feet.

That's a considerable difference in heating bills, you might be thinking, but hardly gasp-worthy. Wait. Look at the figures for electricity before you decide. Last year Baker consumed 933,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. The official forecast for what combined Baker-Berry will use, the first year Berry is open, is over three times that high: 3,250,000 kilowatt hours. All those computers! And, to be fair, all those displaced persons moving into Berry from soon-to-be demolished Kiewit and from Instructional Services. They'll bring a demand of over a million kilowatt hours with them. But when you've made every allowance, Berry is still the greediest library.

In other words, though the ECRMs really work, they reduce nothing. They just help a little to hold down increase. In terms of sus tainability, Berry is a giant step backward.

It didn't have to be that way, at least not so starkly. Dartmouth's own planners had ideas that would have produced a small but important step forward. Some of our top people, eagerly backed by the entire environmental studies staff, had hoped to put a bank of solar panels on top of Berry. Savage savaged that idea, pointing out that the payback period would be 43 years. True. It's also true that sus tainability is beyond price, because without it our culture as we know it has at most a century ahead.

Had we spent $2 50,000 and ordered the solar array, it would have been an 18-kilo watt system—four times as big as the College's one tiny existing array. That's still minute: Berry would have made just over one percent of its power sus tainably. But it might have been big enough to start a trend.

Our planners did manage it so that part of Berry's roof will be compatible with the solar panels that I am optimistic enough to think will go up in about five years. Maybe four if the Antarctic ice keeps breaking up.

Very quickly the other story. Global warming or no, New Hampshire has winter. Berry is going to need to melt snow on part of its roof so that avalanches don't come thundering down on the undergrads. (It's a life mystery to me why Dartmouth keeps getting buildings designed by architects who know so little about snow.)

Savage said: Melt the snow with steam from the steam plant. Our planners had a better idea. Along with about 90 percent of its other stuff, Kiewit is moving its mainframes into Berry (which clearly has something to do with that humongous electric bill). Computer centers, like gasoline car engines and some politicians, generate a lot ofwaste heat. Our planners hoped to use it to melt the snow.

Turns outnot to be feasible. It'll have to be steam for now. But as Phil Chaput, an engineer in the College's facilities operation department, told me, "The snow- melting system is designed so that it could take an alternate heat source in the future, if we find one or a combination that will do the job."

The College is not yet very serious about sustainability nor very worried about global warming. It's not even as serious as an old-fashioned little country like Austria, where every elementary school is scheduled to have a rooftop PV system in operation by the end of 2000. Switzerland has the same plan. I sigh when I think of all the things we could do, and aren't. But I smile when I think of all the talented people working to change that.