A partnership between two local educational facilities has garnered them recognition in saving energy.
The Ohio State University Lima and Rhodes State College have been named an "Energy Efficiency Champion" by American Electric Power Ohio. The two share a campus and have been working together this past year to reduce the amount of electricity being used. Through AEP's continuous energy improvement program, they have been working to change lighting over to LEDs, combine smaller class loads into one building to save on heating and cooling, and using motion sensors to turn lights on and off. The combined campus has saved more than 488-kilowatts of energy from April of 2018 through March of 2019 which is a 6% decrease.
"This particular team did extremely well integrating it, engaging people in the entire campus, and what we find is, if they can learn the practices here, they take them to their house and employ them at their house as well," explained Gary Hendrickson, AEP Ohio energy coach.
"For example, in the evenings we have smaller class sizes and if we can move those all to a single building and cut back on the heating and cooling in another building that will reduce costs drastically," said Cynthia Spiers, Rhodes State College interim president.
"This was something that was done in partnership with our colleagues at Rhodes and I'm excited that this is the beginning of a new day for us to partner with our colleagues and achieve things that'll be to the benefit of the campus as a whole, to our students collectively, and the community as a whole as well," commented Tim Rehner, OSU Lima dean and director.
Both Rehner and Spiers say this is the first of many partnerships between OSU Lima and Rhodes, with many more to come.
