Fight the Power: How One Student Explored School Energy Consumption

Albany High School provides provocative opportunities for many students, including the Environmental Design, Science, Engineering, and Technology program — a two-year sequence in junior and senior years that includes course work in environmental science, history, English and economics.

A key element of EDSET is the requirement that every student intern each Wednesday at a Bay Area environment program.

In my fall junior semester, I focused on energy consumption and worked at the University of California at Berkeley, in the Community Assessment of Renewable Energy and Sustainability Department. In the spring, I stayed closer to home and worked on quantifying the Albany Unified School District’s energy consumption and its associated costs.

Once the benchmarking project was completed, I conducted an informal energy audit of Albany High. I observed shut down procedures of each room, theoretically and actually. My findings show that energy is being wasted. Comparing my audit results to the benchmark data, I noticed that the school spends the most on energy during the months of July to September, approximately $11,000-$13,000 per month. During the school year the monthly energy costs range from $7,000-$9,000.

Energy prices increase during the summer, due to high demand, from $0.137 kWh to $0.184 kWh. This partially explains why the district’s bill increases so much during the summer. But from my audit I can also assume that heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are being left on during the summer and forgotten electronic equipment is left running.

The lighting system has also been a problem, with concerned citizens calling the high school to note that there lights are turned on 24/7.

Regulating the HVAC system not only saves money, but also provides a comfortable learning environment. We have all experienced the discomfort of sitting in a hot, stuffy classroom. To try to learn more about this problem, I checked the thermostat of each classroom to see if it was functioning and/or what temperature it was set for. Most thermostats were a tangled jumble of wires or could not be shut off. The thermostats that I found working were set anywhere between 65 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

High School Principal Ted Barone noted that having a programmable thermostat in each classroom, with a master thermostat that he could control, would be ideal.