Universities Become Natural Leaders In Renewable Energy
Our Universities are demonstrating the practical viability of using alternative energy systems. This is not about a partial use of renewable resources but a move towards a total dependency upon sustainable energy resources.
Beneath the campus of Ball State University in Indiana is a labyrinth of pipes 400 feet deep, filled with water that heats and cools much of the campus and that, when complete, will allow the school to retire four archaic coal-fired boilers.
At the University of Minnesota’s twin campuses in Morris, two 1.6-megawatt wind turbines provide more than half the school’s electricity and power experimental operations making hydrogen fuel and fertilizer. Two solar thermal installations heat and cool an indoor pool and other buildings; and a biomass reactor uses corn cobs to generate steam for heating, cooling and electricity.
Read the rest of this interesting article here.
Throughout the Midwest the trend is to use onsite renewable and clean energy and this usually is either geothermal,wind, solar or biomass. Often we are seeing a mixture of several kinds of alternative energy systems being used in one university. Obviously they are hoping that in the long term they will save money.
Apparently the Universities are also favored in that they can contract to buy clean energy as a way of reducing their carbon footprint.