By Allan Robles, Client Consultant
This year Lucid participated as a session leader and Expo vendor at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference in Pittsburgh. A crowd of 1,600, ranging from student activists to facilities managers to key environmental leaders, converged in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the first LEED Gold convention center and one of the largest green buildings in the world.
The conference opened up on Sunday with words of wisdom from Majora Carter. Majora founded the wildly successful environmental non-profit Sustainable South Bronx in New York City. Majora’s mantra of “Green the Ghetto” has inspired thousands of citizens in her neighborhood and the surrounding boroughs to take action on environmental justice issues ranging from the built environmental to green jobs programs for minorities and people of color. Students were also treated to Student Keynote speaker Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. There were also opportunities for members of AASHE’s Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS) and those who want to enroll their institution in STARS.
Over the course of the conference more than 100 sessions covered all facets of sustainability including waste management, energy efficiency, student activism and resource monitoring. Of those, Lucid’s Director of Public Programs, Andrew deCoriolis, and Lucid’s Research Coordinator, Dr. John Petersen, led two sessions related to Campus Conservation Nationals (CCN) 2012. CCN is an annual competition that challenges colleges and universities to curb their electricity consumption.
Two sessions on Monday and Tuesday revealed insight gathered about the challenges and successes of CCN’s inaugural year from a largely disseminated post-competition survey. More than 100 attendees learned that competitions were often most successful when there were proactive groups of students and staff that engaged with students in residence halls. Unique marketing strategies, such as using dry erase markers on bathroom mirrors and en masse tabling events showcasing Building Dashboard on laptops, helped schools reach a wider audience of student participants. Changes made for CCN 2012 include when it is happening (moved from Fall to Winter/Spring), the time frame of the competition (trimmed from 4 weeks to 3 weeks), and new opportunities for competitions among peer or rival groups.
Other sessions highlighted the importance of real-time monitoring, including “Submetering for Higher Education Campuses with Energy Star.” Victoria Kiechel from the Cadmus Group and American University explained what submetering is and the importance of this information when benchmarking buildings on Energy Star’s widely used “Portfolio Manager.” Victoria pointed out that resource dashboards like Lucid’s Building Dashboard are a complimentary component of overall strategies to reduce energy and water consumption.
AASHE afforded many opportunities for stakeholders to share successful implementation strategies and stories of innovative sustainability initiatives with peer institutions across the country. Lucid is extremely humbled to have hosted sessions at this year’s AASHE Conference and hopes to offer even more insight on CCN 2012 at next year’s conference in Los Angeles, CA.
Photo by AASHE on Flickr
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