For the fourth year, Kent participated in the inter-school energy conservation contest, the Green Cup Challenge. The Green Cup is a creative way to educate students and build enthusiasm about energy conservation – potentially a tough concept for teenagers at boarding school who do not see the direct financial benefits of this conservation. The "challenge" is to see which school can reduce its campus electricity use the most during the month of the contest. Since its inception in 2007, the Green Cup challenge has grown to more than 40 New England boarding schools and over 150 schools nationwide.
Here at Kent, we also have a challenge between the dorms. Every Friday morning, the electricity use is recorded for each dorm and the entire campus. This year, the dorm that showed the greatest reduction in electricity use also won a dress down day. To reduce energy use in the dorms, raise awareness of electricity use, and to prepare for this year’s Green Cup Challenge, the Environmental Club purchased compact florescent light bulbs and distributed them to all students this fall. During the challenge, regular announcements and posters about energy conservation were posted throughout campus. Most important were the individual actions of motivated students who turned off lights, unplugged rechargers and other devices to reduce the “phantom load” of unused electrical devices. See dorm results here.
As a result of these efforts and important school infrastructure changes, Kent School had one of our most successful Green Cup Challenge efforts. Over the course of the month long challenge period, the net electrical use of Kent’s core campus was 7.5% less than average of the past three years. This corresponds to a savings of over 22,000 kWh for the School. As most of the electricity used in Connecticut comes from fossil fuels, particularly coal, this reduction in electricity prevented approximately 11 tons of coal from being combusted to create electricity for us. This means that over 35,000 pounds of carbon dioxide and its potential climate change impact was prevented from entering the atmosphere. This institutional savings is rather dramatic and shows how small actions, when compounded by a large group of motivated individuals, can have a substantial impact on reducing the environmental impacts of our daily lives.
One of the key goals of the Green Cup Challenge is to provide motivation for institutions to alter their electrical use. This is clearly the case at Kent. The maintenance department has taken the information from past years Green Cup Challenge data sets and worked extensively with students and teachers to change the way the School operates. For example, in 2008 the lights in the athletic complex were changed to more efficient bulbs and last year, the large dishwasher in the Dining Hall was replaced with a dramatically more efficient model that utilizes the steam line from the boiler rather than heating all of the water separately. Most importantly, every year the Kent community has seen numerous improvements in energy efficiency, from better windows, to more efficient equipment, to widespread lighting with LED and CFL bulbs. The policies have carried over to the Kent faculty homes and as students return to their homes, they bring the knowledge and strategies from Green Cup success to their families across the world.
