Watts Up? UC Davis Students Evaluate IT Office Equipment Electricity Use
Students will soon begin measuring electricity use with Watts Up power meters in a UC Davis Administration building. The project consists of taking random samples of 30 computers and their peripherals (i.e. external hard drives, desk fans, lights, plug-in calculators) with Watts Up power meters. These meters will measure power usage over time as well as indicate spikes in use. The team will assess how much energy is being used by the staff during a normal 24 hour day. A series of presentations will be made to staff in the building that was evaluated about energy efficiency and opportunities for reducing their energy use, including what computers and peripherals could be turned completely off during down times. After the presentations, the student team will again evaluate energy use with the Watts Up meters to see how big an impact this effort had towards reducing energy consumption in the building.
The Campus Energy Solutions project is one of several underway at the Energy Efficiency Center and is supported by the Community Consulting Group (CCG), which is administered by students in the Graduate School of Management, and by the UC Davis Sustainability Grant Program. The Campus Computing Energy Solutions project is a collaborative effort between a team of Energy Efficiency Center Emerging Venture Analysts, Facilities Management, campus IT services, and faculty and staff members. The project team, comprised of Tracy Hsieh, an undergraduate in Sustainable Design; Siva Gunda, an EEC Emerging Venture Analyst (EVA) and PhD student in Mechanical Engineering; Tai Stillwater, an EEC EVA and PhD in Transportation, Technology & Policy Studies; and Dana Rowan, an M.S. student in Agricultural and Resource Economics and a PhD student in Ecology with an Environmental Science and Policy Emphasis.