Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Green projects used as recruitment tools in higher ed

EIU will save $140 million over the next two decades.

An environmentally unfriendly coal-burning plant on the Eastern Illinois University (EIU) campus was once a deterrent for prospective students. Closing the facility and launching a massive bio-energy initiative has proved a recruitment boon for the university.

EIU decision makers committed last fall to building a Renewable Energy Center, one of the largest university biomass installations in the country, after a coal-burning facility on the Charleston, Ill., campus had drawn considerable public and media scrutiny, becoming a headache for EIU recruiters.

The Renewable Energy Center, a 19,000-square-foot steam plant that will provide heat for buildings and classrooms, uses wood chips from forest residue for fuel, and will slash the campus’s annual carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 20,000 metric tons while saving the school $140 million in energy costs over the next 20 years.…Read More

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Can green tech operate under Moore’s Law?

Doubling the performance of clean-energy technologies every 18 months, as the semiconductor industry has seen with Moore’s Law, is a tough goal to hit. But executives from General Electric and Intel say the same technical and business concepts that underpin Moore’s Law can play out in green tech, CNET reports. Green technologies are following the same type of cost curve as Moore’s Law did in semiconductors, says Steve Fludder, vice president of Ecomagination at GE. In the case of solar, higher volumes of manufacturing of silicon cells have steadily cut costs every year, while newer thin-film technologies pave the way for lower prices and jumps in performance. The same is happening in wind power, where the quality and reliability of turbines has improved as the industry has ramped up in the past decade. Now, the industry is looking at direct-drive turbines for a boost in performance, Fludder said. Organizations can save a significant amount of money by reducing the energy consumption of their data centers, which has an environmental benefit as well. But some of the biggest challenges are institutional, not technical, experts say. The technology is readily available and the economic incentive is there, but IT managers’ performance historically has not been measured based on energy consumption, said Chris Mines, senior vice president and research director at Forrester Research…

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