Energy
In the fiscal year of 2014, Mount Holyoke College spent $1,609,000 on electricity. The college purchases its electricity from the South Hadley Electric Light Department (SHELD), and has been receiving our electricity from them since 1914. SHELD gets it power through the New England Electric Grid which has a multitude of generation resources, shown in the graph below.
Mount Holyoke is able to generate about 6% of its electricity on campus with its back pressure steam turbine. The steam generated from heating the buildings is passed through the turbine and converted to energy. The trubine was installed in 1986, and since then it has saved the college over $1 million in electricity costs.
The college mainly uses natural gas for heating the all building on campus. In FY 2014, MHC spent $2,064,000 on heating. The graph below shows the use of thermal, or heating, energy use shown in blue and electric energy shown in yellow over time. In 2013, the college's total use of thermal energy was equivalent to about 1,340 average Massachusetts homes. Over time, the college has introduced more and more air cooling in the summer months which is the main cause for the increase in electricity use over time. The college has been able to reduce its electricity use by 14% since 2004 through efforts to be more energy efficient. For example, in 2005, there was a retrofit of the lighting in the basketball gymnasium. This replaced the old lights with newer, much more efficient lights. The power used was cut in half while the overall brightness increased. This has saved the college about $4,000 annually in terms of cost of electricity and has reduced our carbon footprint by about 24 tons annually. Another example of an efficiency project is the energy recovery loop that was installed in the science complex in 2007. Simply put, this system reclaims heating and cooling energy from the building exhaust. The system saves the college about $53,000 in temperature control costs annually.
Some thing Mount Holyoke students could do in order to reduce their energy use is shut off lights when leaving a room, shut off computers when not using them, and unplug things as much as possible. Some efforts Mount Holyoke College could do would be to change lightbulbs and light fixtures to be more efficient, install solar panels, and renovate the dorms and other buildings to make them less drafty.
Information from: Nancy Apple, Richard Bigelow, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/envsustainability/energyuse,