Wiki-Pedia | Saving energy = saving money

Penn’s Green Campus Partnership conducted a University-wide power-down hour this past summer. Employees were asked to switch off lights and printers, unplug laptops and phone chargers and to refrain from using computers and other appliances for an hour. In the office where I worked, my colleagues used this time to organize their desks — I met with my boss to plan the upcoming month.

This short and simple initiative decreased the University’s typical energy usage by 21 percent. But that’s not all that’s at stake here. Yes, saving energy is important for the world’s sake, but I’m talking specifically about the nickels and dimes. And students should be more aware of how they can save money by conserving energy.

Another no-power hour is planned for next summer, and one may also be planned for winter break, but is that really enough? It’s easy enough for students to spend one hour a month without their electronics charging — at the least, they can use that hour for a nap.

The University saved $110,000 during the one-hour power down. To put these numbers into perspective a little bit, $110,000 could cover tuition and fees for one student to attend Penn for two years completely cost-free. The sum is life changing, and all it took was one hour of no power.

Although it’s clear that not all of Penn’s funds end up in the same pot, would students change their energy-use habits if they knew their actions were directly influencing someone else’s life? College senior Sam Ni believes students would be a lot more enthusiastic about these initiatives if they knew that the money would come back to them around campus eventually.

Perhaps if the University had publicized it a little more, it could have passed on the responsibility to the students — certainly some of the main consumers of the campus’ electricity. Since most students were gone over the summer, many are unaware of the amount of money saved during those 60 minutes. Ni said she had no idea this event even took place.

While many of us take part in worldwide energy-saving initiatives such as Earth Hour, it should really be second nature to unplug your laptop when it’s fully charged or to turn off unnecessary lights — especially when you leave the room. Although Ni admits that she’s guilty of keeping her room light on when she knows it’ll be dark upon her return, she does realize that there’s a lot of money that could be saved if she just switched off.

There’s an alarming mentality among college-house residents that, since electricity is already included in the rent, it doesn’t matter how much is used or wasted. But, at the end of the day, somebody still has to foot the bill.

So if you leave the lights on when you go to class or — God forbid — when you go home for the weekend or break, you could be cutting into someone’s financial aid package or the funds to fix the chairs in David Rittenhouse Laboratory lecture halls. What is it about saving energy that gets some people so antagonistic?

Sadly, because of the political ideals and controversies surrounding energy consciousness, many students simply don’t believe in the larger benefits of cutting down on energy costs. Jon Urban, a sophomore in the College, found this to be the case during last year’s Earth Hour. He heard that many people were turning on every single possible appliance just to show their resistance to the green movement — an apparently too-left movement.

Saving energy needs to be separated from its political connotations. Students need to look at it simply as saving money — money which will be returned to the University in one way or another.

Wiktoria Parysek is a College senior from Berlin. Her e-mail address is parysek@theDP.com. Wiki-Pedia appears on alternate Mondays.

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