What do you see?  Do you see a happy polar bear, playing with a butterfly?

Perhaps he’s taking a nap next to his “friends”, the baby seal and the baby polar bear…

Or, maybe you see a polar bear that’s running… you see, the sun came out and it started to melt the ice underneath the polar bear’s feet.  He needs to get somewhere, and fast!

What these animations are depicting, if you were perceptive enough to figure out from the dashboard on the left-hand side of the page, is real-time energy usage on the campus of Dartmouth University.  Unlike many other institutions, which have mandated efficiency programs and/or building goals that were set by the university or the government, Dartmouth sought to reduce energy consumption in their dorms – solely through behavioral changes – by 15%.  From their Web site:

Launched on April 24, 2008, the goal of the program is to change behavior by providing energy information in meaningful and compelling ways. … We encourage students to change the way they use energy in their daily lives by monitoring and displaying information about the resources students have control over, such as plug loads for electricity, heat and water use. We hope to help students understand the larger impacts of their actions and develop tools and approaches to energy conservation that can carry over into their everyday lives.

This program at Dartmouth is innovative, educational, interactive, and fun.  It’s also an example of a hybrid energy efficiency system that exists in very few places in the United States – it’s a behavior modification program that relies on a building monitoring system for real-time data.  The polar bear reacts to the energy load on the building at any given time, and the students can therefore react to the amount of energy they are using immediately.  And it’s not presented in a boring way, either … it’s an animation of a polar bear that lives a happy life or dies based on the energy consumption by the students at Dartmouth.

And by all accounts, it’s been a great success.

This is a good example of an innovative system that buildings might want to employ in the future to encourage occupants to save energy.  The polar bear may not work in all circles, but I, for one, do not want to see any majestic animals suffer because of climate change, so this would have worked on me like a charm.

Kudos to the students at Dartmouth for thinking outside the box to achieve massive energy savings on their campus!