Friday, March 29th, 2024
Categories
Featured News

A “Green” Dashboard

Saving energy is one of the ways in which Millersville University’s students can most help us achieve our goal of carbon neutrality by 2040.

Since the inception of the sustainability initiative, Millersville University has taken many steps to become a greener campus. One of these many steps has included the implementation of an Energy Management Dashboard: a website where students and the community can view how much energy many of the buildings on campus use. Initially created during the spring of 2017, this dashboard has proven to not only educate students regarding how to be mindful consumers, but also has saved the university valuable money through the analysis of ways to cut down building energy consumption.

Through this website, participants are able to view how much electricity any building uses compared to the day before and electricity use this past week compared to the week before. In addition, one may also view the electricity use in the last week compared to the rest of the academic buildings and an electricity use intensity comparison from the last seven days compared to the week before.

“Saving energy is one of the ways in which Millersville University’s students can most help us achieve our goal of carbon neutrality by 2040.  The upcoming three-week energy conservation campaign, ‘Ville Unplugged, is a great way to focus on this by pitting the residence halls against each other to see who can save the most energy and tracking the progress in real-time on the online dashboard,” says Millersville’s Sustainability Manager, Chris Steuer.

Students can access the Energy Management Dashboard through a link on Millersville’s sustainability website. From there, all of the available building dashboards are pictured. One may click on one particular dashboard in order to view energy use information  of that particular building or click on the electricity, natural gas or climate buttons at the bottom of the home page to see how all buildings on campus compare to each other.

“Creating this dashboard for an initial set of campus buildings gave us insights that we’re now using to prepare a more detailed dashboard sponsored by the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority at the new Lombardo Welcome Center,” said Steuer.

For additional assistance, view the video tutorial on how to use this unique website.

Leave a Reply