What is EDF's Climate Corps?

Imagine this - MBA students from the country's top business schools spend a summer working with companies to help them reduce their environmental footprint, save energy and save money.

Sounds like a great idea, right? Well, this summer, our Corporate Partnerships team launched Climate Corps—a Peace Corps-like program designed to help companies reduce their environmental footprints and save energy.

Here's how it worked: We trained MBA students from the country's top business schools to work in the office with leading companies and show them how to save money through energy efficiency.

We've seen time and again that many U.S. companies lack simple energy strategies or efficiency investment plans for their facilities and equipment. The energy these companies waste every year means money down the drain—and greenhouse gas emissions added to the atmosphere.

In fact, the energy used in commercial buildings each year is a major source of global warming pollution, responsible for about 17% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

Our Climate Corps team is now back from the trenches—and here are some of their stories:

Intuit's Energy Audit

Stanford University student John Joseph spent the summer at the Mountain View, CA headquarters of Intuit (the maker of TurboTax®, QuickBooks® and Quicken® software).

John roamed the hallways of Intuit, sleuthing out opportunities to save energy—from upgrading the air conditioning and heating systems to installing controls so that bathroom lights and vending machines turn off automatically when not in use (which he discovered is more than 80% of the time!).

All told, he identified more than a half a million dollars a year in potential savings for the company by conserving energy.

Lighting the Way

Marn-Yee Lee, an MBA candidate from Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, was also struck by the energy efficiency opportunities she discovered.

Marn-Yee was placed at the headquarters of NVIDIA, a large company based in Santa Clara, CA, that designs graphics hardware for computers, video game consoles, and mobile devices. Working with NVIDIA's dedicated employee "Green Team," Marn-Yee analyzed the impact of removing unnecessary fluorescent bulbs in overlit areas of the office space.

She found that NVIDIA could save $83,000 annually.

NVIDIA removed 10,000 unnecessary fluorescent bulbs, which will reduce energy consumption by an estimated 825,000 kWh/year and reduce global warming emissions by 729,000 pounds annually, roughly the equivalent of burning 36,000 gallons of gasoline.

NVIDIA will see a return on investment in less than nine months!

These impressive savings inspired the NVIDIA facilities manager to move ahead with similar "de-lamping" projects at other NVIDIA facilities, including a new 11-story NVIDIA office in Taiwan.

Saving Energy on the Human Network

Other Climate Corps interns spent their summers looking for energy savings within an emerging energy consuming sector: data centers.

Data centers are massive banks of servers that provide the computing power necessary to support internet searching, software development, and many other aspects of our increasingly digital economy.

In recent years, as the demand for computing power has grown exponentially, the energy needed to run the world's data centers has skyrocketed. If current trends continue, the EPA estimates data center energy consumption will grow by 12% per year, sending costs and carbon emissions through the roof.

Climate Corps intern Emily Reyna, an MBA/MS student from the University of Michigan, was placed at Cisco Systems this summer. At Cisco, data centers and R&D labs account for about 60% of the company's annual electricity consumption globally.

When Cisco recently set an ambitious goal of reducing GHG emissions 25% from 2007 levels by 2012, they knew they would need to identify new and innovative ways to dramatically cut their energy usage—and data centers and R&D labs were an important place to start.

Emily got to work and found that Cisco could save $24 million over five years by installing "smart PDU's" (power distribution units) in the labs.

Currently, in many labs, most equipment runs all the time, whether it is needed at that moment or not. The PDUs sense when a piece of equipment is not active, and can be turned off until it is needed again.

By moving forward with the PDU installation, Cisco stands to reduce its carbon footprint by nearly 300 million pounds over the next five years! That's equivalent to taking 5,000 cars off the road.

These are just a few of the most inspiring stories from our Climate Corps innovators. This project found easy opportunities to cut waste and reduce greenhouse gas and save money.

In the coming months, our Corporate Partnerships team will be hard at work spreading the word about this summer's results to encourage companies across America to take action on saving energy.

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Posted: 12-Sep-2008; Updated: 11-Sep-2008