| ESC energized about conservation
By Will Refvem
News Editor
FILE PHOTO Members of ESC do their part to conserve energy earlier this year as they promote the frequent use of bicycles.
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If you think things heat up during open house hours now, just imagine if the dorms had more energy-efficient windows.
Jordan Hoogendam of the Environmental Stewardship Coalition (ESC) said that the single-glaze windows now in place in Calvin’s dorms let heat get away like Osama bin Laden—and that’s just one area in which the college could be conserving energy.
“The heat just floods out the windows, because they’re not high efficiency windows,” said Hoogendam. Since so much heat is lost through the windows, the college ends up spending more money on gas than is necessary.
Hoogendam observed that while double-glaze windows would have meant higher initial building costs, in the long run it would save money, not to mention energy. And as Henry DeVries, vice president for administration, finance and information services, told Chimes some weeks ago, money for building projects comes entirely out of Calvin’s endowment, not from tuition. He also told Chimes that utilities, including gas, are paid for with tuition dollars. For students, increased energy efficiency is a win-win situation: if the college conserves energy, it is saving them money, and in the case of high-efficiency windows the extra cost of installing them is not coming out of their pockets but from the endowment.
This was not so compelling an issue a few decades ago, when many of the dorms and other campus buildings were built and energy concerns were a lower priority than today. To the college’s credit, efforts have been made with recent building projects to make the buildings energy efficient. The new DeVos Communication Center, for example, does not have light switches. Instead, there are motion sensors in each room that turn the lights on automatically when someone walks in the room. If there is no movement in the room for five minutes or so, they turn off automatically.
Windows on the dorms and lights that turn off automatically conserve energy once it has been generated. But for Hoogendam and others in ESC, conservation is only one dimension of the issue of energy use. Another is how energy is generated, whether it be burning coal, nuclear reactions or solar power, to name a few.
One way to save energy is to have thermal heating panels installed on the roofs of Calvin’s buildings. These collect infrared energy from the sun and use it to heat water, which runs in pipes underneath the panels. Thus the water is heated and the only energy expenditure is the energy it takes to pump it through the pipes, which, according to Hoogendam, would be minimal.
Many homeowners in California use similar devices to heat their pools in the cooler months.
The genius of such a system of heating water is that even in a sun-starved West Michigan winter it still works, because while it is solar power that is heating the water, it is the infrared rays from the sun that do the heating, and those rays are not affected by clouds.
ESC recently proposed a Student Senate resolution supporting measures to make Calvin a better steward of energy. They also met with DeVries last Friday to present a petition containing the signatures of over 1,000 students and a handful of faculty from across the disciplines.
Hoogendam and David Beversluis, also of ESC, agreed that it was encouraging to have support from so much of the student body and from a diverse array of faculty members.
“It’s basically a petition of support” for measures the college is already taking, said Hoogendam.
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