College copes with ballooning energy bills

Nate Kimball Guest Writer

This year, the United States has seen alarming jumps in energy prices as the price of natural gas has skyrocketed more than 50 percent and electricity in many areas is seeing a 30 percent increase over last year. This has posed some short term issues for Vassar’s energy budget.

President of Finance and Administration Betsy Eismeier calls this increase in costs a “major problem” that is still waiting to be solved in her department. “Our unit costs are much higher than they were last year,” she said.

The College has a fixed energy budget for each year, and with the cold winter last year they went over budget, digging into a contingency fund that is set up for that purpose. This year, however, is different.

“There is only so much we can do,” Eismeier commented. “We didn’t forsee such high energy prices.” For the coming years, Finance and Administration has teamed up with the sustainability committee and the VSA to decide what to do in the face of rising energy costs.

Twenty-eight years ago, coming out of the oil crisis of the 1970s, Vassar implemented a far-reaching energy conservation program that has saved the College energy over the years. The College has reducted energy use by 44 percent since 1977.

The primary factor in this conservation program, according to Professor of Geology Jeff Walker is our ever-problematic steam heating system, which remains to this day highly inefficient. While the efficiency of this heating system is slowly being improved by de-centralizing heat generation and insulating steam pipes across campus, there are other energy use factors that need to be taken into consideration.

Between 2003 and 2004, energy use on campus went down dramatically, and the goal is to keep energy use going down. Going forward, energy conservation will be more difficult, comments Vassar Student Association President Rick Rodems ’06. “Unfortunately most of the low-hanging fruit, conservation-wise, has already been picked”.

How can we lower our energy use on campus? Walker says that there “needs to be a general shift in the perceptions of students towards the energy issue—they need to know that they are directly involved.”

This student responsibility includes knowing how our heating system works and regulating heat efficiently, and also lowering per-capita energy consumption. This need for student-based initiative to lower energy use has prompted many discussions, one in particular stemming from the use of personal refridgerators in rooms.

These fridges, rented from Cecil Distributors, are high-energy use fridges and contribute to a large portion of energy use in residence halls. At a meeting on the energy crisis at the College, there was talk of charging students to bring these fridges, a sort of regressive tax to help distribute the cost of student’s use of energy.

There was a general negative feeling about this among students—social equity issues were brought up, suggesting that students without as much disposable income might choose not to rent a fridge. President of Jewett House Ian Patrick commented that he was “pretty strongly against” charging students for personal refridgerators.

“There is not a place on campus to get food after 12:30 in the morning and being on the meal plan is not mandatory,” commented Patrick. He also commented “though the idea of a communal fridge is nice, it is not practical, as food would be taken and eaten. As Vassar prides itself on treating its students as mature adults, capable of making their own decisions, I think charging would be overstepping boundaries.”

Eismeier commented that many other colleges have this regressive tax built into the refridgerator rental plan, so that students do not even know that they are being charged.

Vassar is faced with a large scale energy use problem. While rising energy use by students is a factor, so is the fact that the heating system at the College requires a large level of student awareness to function properly.

“We need to create a culture of conservation,” commented Walker, “and while a regressive tax on energy use might not be the perfect way to do that, such a move will foster a culture of energy conservation among students.”