Over Winter Break, Syracuse University officials in the Energy Conservation Division implemented and managed building shutdowns and utility cutbacks across campus in an effort to save energy during Winter Break.

Beginning after noon on Dec. 13, all residence halls and unused academic buildings, as well as the vast majority of South Campus apartments that were closed over Winter Break, had lights shut off and heat reduced to 60 degrees.

The conservation program, called the Flexible Work and Sustainability Initiative and commonly known as Green Days, was started by former chancellor Nancy Cantor about five years ago. However, Nathan Prior, the associate director of climate operations, said officials have been active in trying to conserve over Winter Break for as long as he can remember. The amount of energy and money saved year to year has often depended on how extreme the weather is on campus, and how officials respond.

Green Days is in action for all breaks during the school year, including bonus holidays.

Prior has been with SU for 16 years and functions as the leader of the Green Days team. The division maintains an Operations Center that looks at equipment like heat radiators and air conditioning in all the various buildings and make maintenance calls around the clock.

“I’ll come in and troubleshoot with them, but I also coordinate our efforts with different departments like the Physical Plant and Auxiliary Services,” Prior said.

Tanya DiPietro and Emily Greeno are mainly responsible for managing SU’s energy systems. DiPietro, assistant energy conservation manager at SU, has the role of handling all of the heating and cooling systems for the entire university, though her focus is on main campus.

The Green Days team “touches everything that is owned and operated by Syracuse University,” DiPietro said. Such a broad jurisdiction makes it necessary to split up the work, and that is what the Green Days team does.

While DiPietro manages much of SU’s energy cutbacks, the task of managing conservation efforts on South Campus falls to Emily Greeno, an energy conservation manager, who said energy on about 85 percent of South Campus is able to be shut down and reduced over break.

Greeno is also the architect of an end-of-break strategy that the team has been using since she joined in 2012. This strategy, which Prior said made SU much more energy efficient, is essentially a process of gradually and strategically bringing power and heat levels back up to usual levels during the transition from Winter Break to the spring semester. As students begin to move in, Greeno handles the system’s re-emergence very deliberately based on occupancy.

Greeno said it’s important to understand that all the buildings use electric heat. Greeno’s strategic transition, being used for the third time this year, allows SU to save energy and money by avoiding the unnecessary waste of a high peak as students move back into their living spaces.

“Since South Campus is getting its energy all through the same National Grid substation, turning everything back on and bringing up the heat levels all at once risks ‘peaking,’” Prior said. “If we peak during that transition, the university will be paying out that bill for a long time.”

Published on January 12, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Thomas: tjbeckle@syr.edu