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The Dartmouth
July 10, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Event marks the start of conservation campaign

The Dartmouth Energy Conservation Campaign kicked off on Wednesday afternoon with an event in Collis Common Ground. The campaign is designed to help Dartmouth achieve the goal set out by College President James Wright in September to reduce the College's greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The Board of Trustees has allocated $12.5 million for the campaign. The money saved by making the College more energy efficient should repay this funding within four years, College energy engineer Steve Shadford said in an interview with The Dartmouth.

Wright, Shadford, energy campaign intern and organizer Marissa Knodel '09, and computer science professor Lorie Loeb spoke at Wednesday's event.

The Campaign, which is overseen by the Sustainability Office, aims to collect at least 2,000 student "energy pledges" in the next two weeks, update infrastructure and revise College policies and operations in order to achieve its goal.

The energy pledge, which students can sign online, calls for signatories to complete between eight and 12 energy-saving actions in order to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption at Dartmouth.

"I am excited about the energy pledge," Patricia Nicholls '12, who was at the campaign's opening event, said. "I think a lot of people overlook the small changes they can make that actually do add up to make a large difference in saving energy, and I think the pledge will help spread awareness."

Pledge promises include turning off lights, shortening shower times, drinking tap instead of bottled water and switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs.

"We really tried to focus on actions that students and others can control directly, and that are related to direct energy and electricity consumption at Dartmouth," sustainability manager Kathy Lambert said. "We focused on things that students do in their dorm rooms that they can change to reduce energy use."

Although pledge organizers have set a goal for the next two weeks, they hope the overall effects will be enduring.

"I think the overall goal of the campaign is to create a new culture here on campus that is more aware of sustainability issues and what students can do to get involved," pledge captain Kelly McGlinchey '12 said.

Efforts to encourage students to reduce their energy consumption will not end after the campaign's conclusion, Lambert said. Throughout May, the College will track the energy use in all dormitories, Greek houses and affinity houses, and the Sustainability Office will reward the building in each category that reduces the most energy with $1,000 to be used for its own energy efficiency project.

In his speech at the campaign's opening event, Shadford, the College's energy engineer, outlined the campaign's potential projects. They include recovering heat from laboratory buildings, improving ventilation controls and creating a new steam trap maintenance program, among others.

The energy campaign also calls for the renovation of several College buildings to improve energy efficiency. An audit conducted by Facilities Operations and Management found that 25 percent of the College's buildings use about 70 percent of the energy used campus-wide, Lambert said. These buildings include the Burke chemistry laboratory and the West Gym, which was built with highly inefficient lighting systems, Lambert said.

The expansion of the GreenLite project, which monitors outlet and lighting energy output in several residence halls, was also discussed at the event. The meters are connected to interactive screens on each floor to provide real-time feedback on energy use. Several GreenLite stations have been installed in floors of the McLaughlin Residence Cluster, New Hampshire Hall, the Sustainable Living Center and Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority, according to Loeb, who is co-directing the project.

"Someone blitzed out to the house this morning with a subject line 'Turn off your lights' and a message saying 'The polar bear is drowning,'" Theta resident Kaili Lambe '09 said, referring to the project's use of a polar bear to depict energy use.

The polar bear appears happy when energy use is low and becomes increasingly distressed as use increases.

Each meter costs $1,000 to buy, and individual monitors cost another $1,400, which will be funded by the College, Loeb said.

In recent years, Dartmouth has established campus-wide energy policies to increase campus sustainability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

While the College has been successful in some areas, there is still much to be done, Knodel said.

"I feel like Dartmouth has been very strong in certain environmental things, such as environmental education," Knodel said. "Our environmental studies program is the number one in the country. We have gotten an A- on the college sustainability report card three years in a row. But we were actually a little behind in our greenhouse gas reduction commitment, and I feel like we are starting to catch up in the area of energy so [the Energy Conservation Campaign] is a good first step. But we want people to continue to be aggressive, keep seeing how we can improve."