Tufts' Environmental Consciousness Outreach (ECO) organization, in conjunction with the Tufts Climate Initiative (TCI) and two non-profit organizations, Smartpower and EnviroCitizen, is working to bring a renewable clean energy source to the Tufts campus.
According to ECO Chair senior Jennifer Baldwin, all of the energy that Tufts uses comes from conventional forms of energy, e.g., oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. A portion of this energy, according to the ECO plan, would be supplied by turbines that harness energy from wind.
Solar, water and wind energy are considered types of "renewable" and "clean" energy, Baldwin said, and wind energy is the cheapest and most environmentally sound of the three. Fuel sources like oil, coal and natural gas, which are used most commonly today, are fossil fuels and are therefore not renewable. Fossil fuels also often release potentially harmful chemicals into the air when burned.
"The emissions from conventional energy contributes to problems like asthma, air pollution, and toxic waste disposal," Baldwin said. "Switching from coal to wind power would save air quality."
The problem with using wind power, according to Director of Environmental Studies George Ellmore, is that this renewable energy source is very expensive to produce.
In order to bring this wind power to Tufts economically, ECO proposed that only a small portion of Tufts energy be changed over to wind power.
"Picture a large energy bathtub, with faucets for nuclear power, coal and oil power, and a smaller faucet for wind power," ECO member sophomore Aditya Nochur said. "We want to keep the energy level constant in the tub, so turning on the wind power faucet would allow us to decrease use of the other faucets."
The excess in cost, according to Baldwin, would be offset by a small increase in tuition costs, as little as $10 per student per semester.
"If we raise $10 per student per semester and the majority of students agree to pay this extra amount, we could have up to 60 percent of Tufts' energy coming from wind power [rather than conventional energy sources]," Nochur said.
To gain support for the initiative, the ECO group posted 1,000 pinwheels into the ground on the President's Lawn for students to take last Wednesday, April 6.
On Wednesday, April 20, the initiative will be voted on the by the whole Tufts community on the Tufts Community Union (TCU) election ballot. The referendum will ask students if they would be willing to pay the fee necessary to change a portion of the source of Tufts' energy use from coal to wind power.
"The University gets the same amount of energy, but the money ends up in different places," Baldwin said.
Nochur said that the referendum will not be a binding resolution."But it will demonstrate to the administration and the trustees the strong support for this measure on campus," she said.
The University's movement toward use of wind power as a form of energy is just another in a growing list of examples of colleges across the country who have switched over to this new form of energy. According to Baldwin, over 50 schools have purchased some forms of clean, renewable energy.
Connecticut College currently charges $25 per student to add wind as a form of energy for the campus to use. Trinity College ran its Spring Fling social event entirely on wind power. The Harvard University School of Public Health also uses wind power and Brown University uses other forms of renewable energy sources, according to Baldwin.
"Harvard University recently had a referendum [similar to Tufts'] and it passed, and now the [Tufts] administration is debating what to do," said Nochur.
