Ecologue

Incandescent lamps are the poster child of energy waste; their glare disguises the fact that 90% of the energy consumed by an incandescent lamp  is wasted as heat.  With the help of six GEO 300 – Sustainability for the Common Good students, Sustainability Office staff changed over 100 incandescent lamps to energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps […]

Building on the success of the 1st OSU Building Energy Challenge (BEC), which took place in February 2010, the Sustainability Office is actively planning and promoting the 2nd iteration of the event.  The premise of the BEC is to encourage occupants of participating buildings to show measurable energy savings through the cumulative effect of individual’s […]

Today, May 13, marks the middle of a two week OSU test to see how much energy – electricity specifically – can be saved by wider implementation of computer power management settings. While it may seem pretty trivial to look at powering down computers and monitors when not in use, the savings add up.  While […]

With apologies for the gap between blog entries, I thought it might be time to write a little (or a lot) more about the installation of “human power” harvesting at our Dixon Recreation Center. The press coverage OSU received as a result of this innovative installation exceeded even my expectations, and responses have been overwhelmingly […]

For years, people have been asking me and others at OSU why we don’t harness all that energy from people working out on stationary bikes and other exercise equipment.  There were some very good technical reasons, including a gap in technology available to convert this intermittent energy into the alternating current that buildings use.  One […]