ITS, Media Services and the Office of Sustainability’s Green Advisors Program are currently working on a project aimed at reducing computer energy usage across campus.

The first stage of the project will be to monitor energy usage in the Beardsley Media Center. We will collect quantitative data on our electricity usage while implementing strategies to reduce the electricity demand from computers in the lab.

We aim to create behavioral changes in how students interact with computers (i.e. ensuring students/staff turn off machines at the end of the night or leaving inactive machines in sleep mode). Additionally, we will explore potential software/hardware-related changes that could reduce energy consumption. The project will also explore how much energy our printers are consuming.

We will begin late January as we measure and collect data on baseline energy usage. We hope to demonstrate improvement in energy reduction over the course of February to April. Over the lifetime of the project, we will try to show how the energy savings we can achieve in the Media Center can be expanded to other campus computer labs.