Ready for a Power Trip? Track Campus Electricity Use in Real Time with W&L's New Energy Dashboard

Are you curious to see how much electricity your building has used today? This month? This year? Want to know how campus buildings compare against each other? Or the CO2 equivalent of the electricity used? Want to turn off the air conditioning in your Village Townhouse and see -right now- if it makes a real impact? Or how about exploring a "heat map" for your building or apartment to understand when energy use is highest? Find all this and more right here: https://go.wlu.edu/powertrip

Some things to know before your "trip."

1. Not all campus buildings are included in the dashboard. Why? Many of our largest campus buildings, and the entire upper division housing Village, are all lumped together on one main electrical meter, making it very difficult to pinpoint energy related problems and opportunities. Sub-meters were installed in these buildings to provide accurate, building-specific information. These sub-meters supply the data to the PowerTrip dashboard.

Unlike the larger buildings, most of the smaller buildings on campus (for example, fraternities, theme houses, Hillel House, Red House etc.) each have their own utility meter and can be analyzed for energy consumption simply by looking at the monthly electric bill. Sub-meters have not been installed in these buildings because they are not strictly necessary. Unfortunately, this means there is no real-time data for these buildings available for the dashboard, yet.  

2. Water use data is included wherever possible. At the moment this information comes from uploading our water bills from the city, which only come every sixty days - so this information is not "real time." It's not quite as satisying as fixing a running toilet and watching the graph immediately drop off, but we hope you still find it interesting for understanding campus patterns and trends. 

3. While this public dashboard is a great place to start exploring, even more detail is available on many campus buildings, including all Village apartments and townhouses. For access to a detailed dashboard of your building, contact Jane Stewart or Morris Trimmer. 

4. This tool is new - feedback is important! If there are features you would like to see, elements you don't understand, data that looks wrong - please share your thoughts. The goal is to make this information available so it will be useful, and your input is essential.

5. Metering of all Village apartments and townhouses was possible thanks to a grant from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund and the hard work of Facilities Management staff. We are grateful!

OK on your mark, get set, GO!  https://go.wlu.edu/powertrip