How can kids save energy?
What are some ideas for teaching kids about saving energy at school?
How can kids save energy in school? We are planning to do a project on saving energy at our school. We want to address lighting, water usage, heating, and any other energy uses.
How should we go about this? What actions do you recommend? Any ideas or suggestions?
Answer from Green Energy Efficient Homes
Kids save energy when they're given the chance. Students understand the need to conserve better than most grown-ups, and students from primary school on up through university can be very effective both at finding ways to save, and at encouraging regular old 'grown-ups' to save energy too.
Here are my suggestions for your school energy saving project.
Any systematic energy saving effort needs to start with measurement. If you don't measure your usage up front you won't know where the opportunities for savings are, and you won't be able to figure out what savings you achieved at the end of the effort. You can easily measure electricity usage of individual plug-in devices with an inexpensive power meter like the Kill A Watt meter or the Belkin energy cost monitor.
Start by buying enough power measurement meters for your class - perhaps one for every two students. A friend of mine who teaches environmental studies in a nearby high school contacted his local utility and convinced them to pay for a dozen high quality power meters at $200 a pop - but really a Kill A Watt or Belkin unit will do pretty much the same job. He dispatched his students around the school, having them measure the electricity consumption in watts (a measurement of power use at a point in time), or kilowatt hours (a measurement of power use over a time period), and the kids went nuts measuring the consumption of personal computers, photocopiers, pop machines, the personal space heater under a teacher's desk, the coffee maker in the science department staff room, and so on. They found out from the janitors what the wattage of each ceiling fluorescent light was and multiplied that wattage by the number of tube lights in each classroom or hallway. They then computed the total electricity use of the school by multiplying the wattage of each item by the estimated hours per week the item was in use - for example, classroom lights are typically on 8-9 hours a day, weekdays only, so about 40-45 hours a week, while the computers were left on 24x7, or 168 hours.
They discovered a number of opportunities for savings. For example, the pop machines didn't need to be keeping the Coke and Sprite cool all weekend, so they got the school to pay for an electrical timer, and put the machine on the timer, setting it to cut power to the unit on Friday at 3 pm (the pop would stay cold for a couple of hours after that) and restored power at 3 am Monday morning. They found that while the school board policy required computers to be left on continuously, this was only so that occasional security updates could be rolled out over the network to the units, but in fact if the computer was turned off during an update, it would be updated the next time it was powered back on, so students were encouraged to turn off all PCs at the end of the last class each day.
You can turn down the heat, we're dressed for it!
Photo by woodleywonderworks, via FLICKR
Not only did the kids save energy through initiatives such as this, or by adding Turn off lights stickers to the light switches by each classroom door, reminding teachers to not leave lights on when they left a room - they talked the principal into taking a before and after reading of the school's overall electrical consumption, and crediting part of the savings from the student initiatives towards a school greening fund. This made the kids not only keen to identify sources of waste, but really keen to educate (or scold) their teachers about wasteful practices they saw in the classroom.
In the initial year of the project the kids saved energy to the tune of several hundred dollars worth of electricity a month, and they put part of that money towards a school tree planting campaign - which would reduce cooling costs in hot weather - and part towards setting the school up to buy green electricity - electricity generated from renewable sources like wind or hydropower. Green electricity typically costs more than coal or nuclear power, because coal and nuclear power get hidden subsidies in the form of pollution or nuclear waste whose costs are not paid for by the power producer.
In the end, the kids became much more conscious not only of ways to cut energy waste in their school, but of where they were wasting energy at home as well. Many of the students took the power meters home and measured electricity usage of home televisions, computers, appliances, and so on, and found ways to save energy at home. It's amazing how passionate kids can become about saving energy, especially when there are adults they can correct. I know this from my own kids, who don't hesitate to chew me out whenever I forget to turn off a light when I leave the room!
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