Energy
Sustainability Rises to a Community Passion
Learn about MIT's sustainability efforts in the video Sustainability at MIT: Greening MIT's Campus and Beyond.
Sustainability, a concept that is gaining new urgency worldwide, is getting a hands-on workout at MIT through projects that use the campus as a test lab and through a host of faculty and student projects. Sloan graduate student Adam M. Siegel, in Sustainability at MIT: Greening MIT's Campus and Beyond, a new video produced by the MIT Alumni Association, proposes one definition. He describes sustainability as "the question of how to meet today's needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This is a simple definition, but far distant from most worldwide development practices.
Siegel is copresident of the 750-member student group Sustainability@MIT, a new coalition that unites student efforts to host conferences, high profile speakers, and symposia. Students like these are also providing the person-power to fuel concrete changes on campus. In the video, Sloan Senior Lecturer Sarah Slaughter '82, SM '87, PhD '91, described a student project that measured electricity use in the chemistry building before and after lights were turned off overnight. Lighting accounts for nearly 30 percent of MIT's annual 200 GWh consumption of electricity. At first, the students found no significant drop in energy consumption. Then, through observation and analysis, they realized the fume hoods had been left open every night causing the air systems to keep running. Educating faculty and students to shut the fume hoods resulted in significant energy savings in a critical area.
Slaughter, a Sustainable Business Lab (S-Lab) instructor, offered her definition of sustainability that, naturally, involves management: "The way we define sustainability is an opportunity to transform organizations, communities, and the world." The MIT Sloan Initiative for Sustainable Business and Society, home of the S-Lab, was launched in February 2007 to work with government organizations, large corporations, and small business to address diverse sustainability challenges.
The Campus Energy Task Force, headed by MIT Professor Leon Glicksman '59, PhD '64, and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Theresa Stone SM '76, is guiding seven groups that are working on issues from long-range, campus-wide plan to changing the wasteful behaviors of individuals. Dozens of projects are underway such as green planning for the new Sloan building and installing a thermoelectric system to harness waste heat in the exhaust flues of MIT's cogeneration facility to generate electric power. Faculty work on the frontiers of energy systems, fuel alternatives, and environmental impact. MIT now offers more than 100 classes with a sustainability component. A major conference, the MIT Sustainability Summit, is scheduled for April 24-25, 2009.
While sustainability efforts stretch across MIT's physical and intellectual landscape, alumni are also rising to the call for new solutions. In December, the Alumni Association Board of Directors appointed a committee on energy and the environment to be co-chaired by Bruce Anderson '69, MAR '73, and Natalie Givans '84. Their goal is to propose how alumni, who are well represented in energy, environmental, and related engineering fields, can be involved with MIT initiatives. For now, alumni can join the alumni sustainability email group to learn more.
Many alumni are apt to be drawn to the sustainability mission as well as the challenge. Sloan graduate student Jason Jay, who helped organize the annual campus energy brainstorm called the MIT Generator, says that MIT's culture has a natural bent toward collaboration across disciplines and the "engineering-hacking aesthetic of hands-on projects."
As Sigel notes in the video, MIT's contributions will involve even more than cutting-edge research and student-powered campus innovations. In essence, MIT's ultimate contribution may be "optimism, hope, and innovation."
By Nancy DuVergne Smith
Published December 18, 2008
