U.S. Green Building Council Applauds Newly Released International Green Construction Code

IgCC offers a new code baseline for greener building construction that is complementary to LEED

Industry Leaders Comment on Reliability, Efficiency, and Environmental Advantages of District Energy/CHP

At the Opening Plenary Panel of IDEA's recent 25th Campus Energy Conference, leaders from universities including Cornell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Princeton, and Texas A&M shared perspectives on combined heat and power (CHP)/District Energy on their campuses:

• At the District Energy/CHP Delivers Reliability session, panelists noted how, thanks to CHP, mission-critical functions had been unaffected by periodic failures on the electricity grid. In some cases, their campuses were the only place in town where business-as-usual could be conducted during, and in the aftermath of, major weather events that knocked out electricity regionally.
• In the District Energy/CHP Improves Efficiency & Provides Savings session, it was noted that district energy systems with CHP generate thermal energy and electricity for campuses yielding significant cost savings year after year.

Ball State U Completes First Phase of Campus Geothermal System

The university has completed the first phase of what the U.S. Department of Energy is calling the"nation's largest geothermal heating and cooling system." The $80 million project is expected to save the university $2 million in annual operating costs and cut its carbon footprint by nearly 50 percent. The system should be complete by next year, at which time the university will decommission the remaining two coal-fired boilers and be a completely geothermal district heating and cooling campus. Learn more.

U South Carolina Students Initiate Carbon Neutral Athletics

Student athletes have been hard at work planting trees and exchanging energy-efficient light bulbs around campus to offset the carbon emissions of men's basketball games. The university's first carbon-neutral athletic event was intended to create awareness of the carbon emissions produced by sporting events and to pave the way for larger-scale carbon neutral events around campus. Learn more.