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Learning to Conserve “It was a humbling experience,” says Dunne of his service as education director on the three-week expedition to the almost-entirely uninhabited continent. “It’s a place where nature, not man is in control.” Yet Dunne also saw firsthand evidence of man’s impact on that extraordinary place. There were more icebergs than Dunne had seen on an earlier trip to the region. This and the fact that ships were able to navigate into the region earlier in the season was evidence that the winter pack ice around the Antarctic was starting to melt sooner each year. Many scientists now attribute these changes to human-induced climate change. “You don’t experience a place of such majesty, and see what man is doing to it, without it having an impact on you,” says Dunne. “It changed my life.” Dunne returned to his home in the suburban community of Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, England, 30 minutes outside London, determined to make a difference in the fight against climate change. As the head teacher of Ashley Church of England Primary School, his thoughts turned to how his 240 students, ages 4 to 11, could be part of that challenge. They could reduce the carbon footprint of their own school and its 150-year-old main building, a product of a time before energy conservation and sustainable resources were bywords of international discourse. “Having the technology is all well and good,” says Dunne. “But any organization could install these technologies. We’re a school. We had a special responsibility to use them as learning tools, to educate our children about responsible energy use.”
John Taylor and Robert Battye felt the same way. Taylor, a former manufacturing systems engineer and education professional, founded TR Control Solutions to offer resource monitoring technology to industrial organizations. In 2007 he was joined by Battye, an IT services executive and they set about developing an IT solution for schools. Their aim was to produce—both a tool to help reduce the carbon footprint of a school, and a resource to help educate its children. Their product, eco|Driver™, based on Windows® and Microsoft® .NET technologies, monitors energy and water use and provides information and analysis that can then inform conservation plans, classroom education, and student activities. “We all need to know whether we’re driving our schools in a sustainable way and to work toward doing so,” says Taylor. “We can’t leave this to a facilities manager alone.” eco|Driver™ makes it possible for administrators, teachers, and students to monitor, manage, and report on a school’s consumption of water, electricity, natural gas, and other resources. Taylor likens eco|Driver™ to the instrument panel in an automobile or on an aircraft. Data reflecting the consumption levels—and the cost of that consumption—is displayed on a large-screen monitor so the whole school can track how changes in behavior will save them money and reduce the school’s carbon footprint. Taylor and Battye rolled out their product in March 2007. Ashley C of E Primary School became one of their first customers. The first step for the school was introducing eco|Driver to its staff. Taylor worked with teachers to get them up-to-speed on the technology. Those teachers are now using eco|Driver™
At the beginning of the latest school term, teachers gave their students a printout showing the school’s current energy use in bar charts as reported by eco|Driver™, along with a printout of energy use from the previous term. As an educational exercise, the teachers didn’t ask their students questions about the school’s energy use—they asked the students to come up with questions of their own. “It was fascinating to see where the students took this information,” says Dunne. “They noticed that energy use was higher at the beginning of the week than at the end of the week—and they wanted to know why. They noticed that energy use dropped off toward the end of the day, as you’d expect, but then came up to quite a high level—and, again, they wanted to know why.” Students explored those questions and discovered that the appliances that got their heaviest use on Mondays were the photocopiers, as teachers prepared handouts for the week. Students also traced the end-of-day energy use to an after-school club—and used the eco|Driver™ reports to convince club members to moderate their energy use. “If we can get the after-school club members to remember to turn off computers and electrical games when they are not using them, we should start to see a reduction in after-school energy consumption,” says student Elliott Sharp, age 10. “It’s still early days for our use of eco|Driver, but we can already see results,” says Dunne. “Students are turning off printers, computers, and televisions at the socket, not just putting them on standby when they’re not in use, because now they can see the
impact of turning them off. The first day of this term we used 180 kilowatt-hours of energy in the main building, partly through using energy-demanding electric heaters. Now we’re below 100 kilowatt-hours, a reduction of 44 percent. We’re empowering students and staff by giving them the information they need to make the connection between using energy and consuming resources. Ultimately we hope it will lead to sustained behavioral change. Conservation of energy will be in their consciousness.”
And the schools’ use of eco|Driver™ isn’t limited to measuring the consumption of energy. eco|Driver™ also captures the generation of electricity by the school’s recently installed solar photovoltaic panels. Students can see how much these produce and compare that to the consumption of electricity by the school. Dunne doesn’t expect his school’s use of eco|Driver™ to stop there. The software can monitor resources beyond electricity, such as water, and Dunne says the school will eventually include eco|Driver™’s water monitoring capability in its sustainable resources program. Because no school is an island, particularly in the Internet age, Dunne is currently working on a collaborative project with other eco|Driver™ schools, both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere—eco|Driver™ is in use as far away as Australia—to promote global environmental awareness and education, and to reduce carbon emissions. “eco|Driver™ gives us a depth of analysis and a learning experience that simply isn’t available elsewhere,” says Dunne. “This is exactly the tool we need in our school and in our classrooms. It’s helping us to change mindsets, to change behavior.” And, says Dunne, it’s helping to move the world a step closer to preserving the beauty he observed on that tear-stained day in Antarctica.
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| TR Control Solutions Ltd, Hersham Place Technology Park, Molesey Road, Hersham, Walton-On-Thames, Surrey, KT12 4RZ |
Under Dunne’s leadership, the school won grants to install solar technologies to generate electricity and heat water, a biomass boiler to generate heat using locally sourced wood pellets, and low-energy lighting to conserve electricity. It was a start but it wasn’t enough.
Students—along with teachers and administrative staff—can view live data on a 32-inch LCD monitor in the school’s reception area, where it shows up in visual dashboards with line and bar graphs, plus numeric readouts. The same information—including kilowatt-hour usage and expense for every day of the month and every month of the year, plus carbon dioxide production data and comparisons to the previous year—is also available over the school’s intranet. 
The results that the school gets with 