Energy Savings in Labs Program

Labs consume 5-10x more energy per square foot as compared to office spaces! Not only that, but fume hoods account for 40-70% of the total energy used by laboratories.

As such, campaigns working to change behaviours surrounding energy savings make labs not only more energy efficient and safer, they can also help labs save money on maintenance or replacement of equipment that is used unnecessarily. However, a substantial amount of energy inefficiencies exists, often due to equipment left running unnecessarily or operating inefficiently. Raising awareness through accurate measurement of lab equipment energy usage will encourage behavioral and operational changes, leading to reduced energy consumption in laboratories.

Here, Caltech Green Labs proposes a student-led campaign to collect data, educate, encourage behavioural changes, and assess success of a energy savings in labs campaign. We hope to take an inventory each participating lab's equipment, measure the energy consumption of various items, and ask labs members how much time items are used. We will then complete an assessment of both the energy consumption (kWh) and dollars per year that labs consume.

Once completed, we plan to offer a list of suggestions for ways each lab can save energy, and compare their current expenditures and costs with what our assessments would realize. We also hope to conduct energy savings experiments in labs to verify our suggestions. Other universities have seen more than $3 savings per square foot of lab space, and we hope to see similar results if such a campaign was implemented at Caltech.

To run this project successfully, we intend to use help in the form of one to three interns. All data collected during this campaign will be presented to the community in various forms, including (but not limited to) during the Annual Green Labs Lightning Talks Event and other conferences. Furthermore, find here a link for our regularly updated Energy Assessments data sheet showing all items we have assessed.

The assembed circuit of our non-commercial energy monitoring system in which the calibrated voltage measured by the voltage sensor is being tested and compared to a voltmeter.

Our plan: Utilizing the help of interns over the coming year, we hope to calculate and measure the energy consumption of at least 10 labs. Then, our group will put together suggestions to make each lab more energy efficient and do those energy calculations. Then, each student will propose and conduct their own experiments to verify a suggested action's potential energy savings. Further, we hope our students can develop their own non-commercial (and potentially non-invasive!) sensor to measure energy consumption. We will work with lab managers and PIs to gain permission to run the study, and will continually educate users on best energy practices. Education will continue after the program to encourage users to sustain their energy savings after the surveys are complete. Our interns will present their work at the annual Green Labs Lightning Talks event, and will produce a writeup describing the campaign results to share with the community.