Purpose: There is a great interest in developing eco-friendly operations as alternative uses of resources in the university campus, making the employment of technologies more sustainable. Practices such as energy management and efficiency initiatives have been encouraged to meet these sustainability goals. The purpose of this paper is to describe…

Confronting issues of global climate change will require creative approaches to energy consumption across a range of human activities. This design case looks at the evolution of a physical/digital hybrid board game that we created to encourage families to reflect on household energy consumption and environmental sustainability. Design in this…

When museums commission green buildings, those buildings are often covered in the press. To understand the educational potential of green building press coverage, we qualitatively analyzed 96 articles about eight U.S. green science museums. We found that journalists who cover green buildings highlight green roofs, material choices,…

Vocational education and training (VET) can play a transformative role in reducing CO[subscript 2] emissions and improving the energy efficiency of buildings across Europe. Nearly zero energy building (NZEB) requires an energy literate workforce, with broader and deeper theoretical knowledge, higher technical and precision skills,…

Purpose: Energy consumption and renewable energy sources are included in the goals for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) agenda, and target buildings are the biggest electricity consumers. In turn, Netzero energy buildings (NZEB) contribute to achieve SDG7 goals. This paper aims to identify which Brazilian higher education…

The continued and substantial increase in technological resources generates a new concept of education that utilizes online resources -- blended learning. Blended learning represents a combination of face-to-face experiences and online learning experiences. The advantage of this multiple-method approach is that it offers the opportunity to achieve…

In the New England region, where temperatures range from below 0 to over 100 degrees, heating and cooling can present a major opportunity to improve sustainability statistics of a campus. Overt changes such as improving windows come to mind, but recent advancements in boiler technology and strategies for working with the heat of the sun and the…

More than 250 higher education leaders from campuses across the U.S. met last week in Boston for the 2014 Presidential Summit on Climate Leadership. The summit was organized by Second Nature, the supporting organization for the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Almost 700 colleges and universities have…

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has experienced rapid growth in the last decade. In addition to educating over 17,000 students annually, UAB is a major research facility and academic healthcare center. Due to growth and expansion, UAB requires more and more water to sustain operations. The central chilled water system serves over…

This article presents trends in the heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC/R) industry, with an emphasis on the importance of technician training programs as exemplified at the East Valley Institute of Technology (EVIT) in Mesa, Arizona. The article states that HVAC workers are increasingly helping their consumers "go…

Reducing school district energy expenditures has become a universal goal, and new technologies have brought greater energy efficiencies to the school environment. In Part 1 of this two-part series, the author discussed the steps required to establish an energy conservation and management program with an emphasis on lighting. In this article, he…

Far from the limelight of LEED, Energy Star or Green Globes certifications are the energy codes developed and updated by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the International Code Council (ICC) through the support of the Department of Energy (DOE) as minimum guidelines for building envelope,…

Facility managers everywhere are tasked with improving energy efficiency to control costs. Those strides cannot be achieved at the expense of system performance and reliability, or the comfort of the people within those properties. There are few places where this is truer than in schools and universities. K-12 schools and university lecture spaces…

One of the fastest growing trends in school design is Net Zero Energy Schools. There are now at least a dozen or more schools completed or in construction that have achieved, or have committed to, this incredible level of energy efficiency. In this article, the author examines this trend and take a brief look at some of the exemplary projects that…

Self-declared energy and carbon reduction goals on the part of progressive colleges and universities have driven ground source geothermal space heating and cooling systems into rapid evolution, as part of long-term climate action planning efforts. The period of single-building or single-well solutions is quickly being eclipsed by highly engineered…