Portland State students vote next week on a “Green Initiative Fund” that will add another $5 to the fees they pay each term.
The money will be used in a variety of ways to reduce the school’s carbon footprint.
According to the Daily Vanguard, it includes a subsidy for TriMet Flex Passes for students, and more money for such things as bike stations and new bikes for the bike loan program.
There’s also a good chunk of change, about $500,000 a year, to help finance sustainability projects on campus. The voting takes place May 4 – 8.
At Oregon State, students pay $8.50 per term to help the school buy renewable energy, helping make it the 49th largest buyer of renewable energy in the country.
What really happened today is that OSU tested its new hurricane wavemaker at the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory. The $1.1 million dollar simulator is designed to show how long shallow waves, the type created by tsunamis and sustained hurricanes, will impact coastal areas. It’s the largest simulator of its kind in the country.
The demo kicks off a series of research projects starting this summer. One of the first will study how wooden structures, which are common on the Oregon coast, will hold up during tsunami events. Figuring that out is important. Earlier research by OSU shows that the fastest way to evacuate from a tsunami isn’t running away, but going up. That is, going to the top levels or roofs of buildings. But if the buildings can’t withstand tsunami force waves, then the whole evacuating up idea isn’t going to work.
OSU released this video of today’s demonstration. The first highlight comes at about 25 seconds.
According to Hinsdale Lab Director Dan Cox, the real value of this new simulator is the size of the waves it creates.
“Because the materials used for coastal construction – wood, concrete and steel – have complicated properties, they cannot be studied easily at small scale,” says Cox. “The new wavemaker is bigger and improves the accuracy of our research and applicability to real-world structures.”
Other research projects coming up include, a study on how hurricane force waves can overtop levees and the damage it does, and another study looking at the impact of these waves on coastal vegetation.
The money for the new simulator came from the National Science Foundation.
Intel is the largest buyer of renewable energy in the country, according to a list released today by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA says Intel purchased more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours of green power this year, about the same amount of electricity it takes to power 130,000 homes. This is the second year in a row that Intel has topped the EPA’s green power list. Intel gets its renewable energy from wind, which provides about 46% of the company’s energy needs.
Oregon State University ranked high, too. It’s the country’s 49th largest buyer of renewable energy, getting nearly 67 million kilowatt hours of power from biogas, biomass and wind. The school gets 74% of its electricity from green power. OSU students pay about $8.50 in extra fees to help the school buy renewable energy.
Other Oregon institutions fared well on the list, too. Southern Oregon University, Kettle Foods, and the Tualatin Valley Water District are among several Oregon schools, businesses and agencies that purchase 100% of their power from renewable sources.
