The College has pledged to invest $1 million in the Billion Dollar Green Challenge, a new sustainability initiative centered on using "green revolving loan funds" to promote energy efficiency at colleges across the country, Rosi Kerr, director of the Office of Sustainability, said. The project launched on Oct. 11 by the Cambridge-based non-profit organization Sustainable Endowments Institute currently includes 32 member institutions and aims to bring together $1 billion in combined loans, according to its website.
Although the initiative remains in its initial planning stages, the College hopes to begin working on projects this winter, Kerr said.
"There is a lot to work out but there is still good momentum," she said.
Revolving funds will provide loans to universities that will then embark on self-managed energy efficiency projects, according to the program's website. The institutions will reinvest the energy-related savings in their future sustainability endeavors.
Approximately $900,000 of Dartmouth's funds will be invested in improving campus facilities' energy efficiency, while the remaining $100,000 will go toward student, faculty and staff sustainability initiatives that may or may not have "savings paybacks," Kerr said.
The majority of projects which will likely include upgrading lighting fixtures, maximizing window efficiency and improving heating systems are expected to have short payback times of four years or less and will hopefully return more than the initial loan values, Kerr said.
Campus community initiatives may include a solar-thermal dorm proposal, a wind turbine demonstration to educate campus about wind energy and a display of solar panels to illustrate another potential fuel source.
"These could be projects for a dorm or an affinity house," Kerr said. "The student projects will have longer paybacks, but they have more educational value."
Dartmouth was invited to become a member of the Billion Dollar Green Challenge's "founding circle" due to the College's previous involvement with revolving loan funds, Kerr said. Over the past several years, students in the environmental studies program have developed a proposal for a green revolving fund at the College and have engaged in conversations with Mark Orlowski, founder and executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, according to Kerr.
"This group of students studied revolving loan funds in ENVS 50 [Environmental Problem Analysis and Policy Formulation] and designed a fund that would work at Dartmouth," Kerr said. "Some of the students became so passionate about the topic that they stayed at Dartmouth the summer after they graduated to design the financial architecture of the fund."
The Office of Sustainability and other College officials are currently determining the best way to solicit project proposals from the community and to manage paybacks, Kerr said. The College will form a proposal review board in the coming months, and no proposals have been received as of this week, she said.
The projects will enable students to "interact with sustainability" and will provide them with valuable "real-world experience," Kerr said. They will also benefit the larger student body, which will experience improved lighting, more efficient infrastructure and waste reduction, she said.
Colleges are an ideal setting in which to begin sustainability initiatives due to their large endowments, Emily Flynn, special projects manager for the Sustainable Endowments Institute, said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"We started with colleges and universities because collectively their endowments account for about $400 billion, money that can and should be invested in energy-efficient technology and used to help campuses reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and their operating budgets at the same time," Flynn said.
Member colleges will collaborate to form a support system for other institutions throughout the United States and Canada aiming to implement sustainability measures on their respective campuses, Flynn said.
Harvard University is the only other Ivy League school that has joined the challenge thus far, according to the project's website. Other participants include Middlebury College, Boston University, California Institute of Technology and Stanford University.
