Kirkwood’s Washington County Regional Center
Kirkwood Community College has been building environmentally friendly halls since 2006, and has been retrofitting existing structures that predate the first geo-thermal facility.
In addition to green heating and cooling, Kirkwood installed a wind turbine on its main campus in Cedar Rapids in February 2012. This turbine acts as a life-sized simulator for instructing wind technology students, and concurrently produces local and sustainable power for the college. The blades turn almost constantly, needing only 12mph winds to produce up to 2.3 megawatts an hour.
“Between geothermal and wind energy, Kirkwood saves roughly $600,000 a year in electricity,” says Tom Kaldenberg, Kirkwood’s associate vice president of Facilities and Security. “That number will continue to rise as we’ve just opened the new Washington County Regional Center, and soon, we’ll open the The Kirkwood Regional Center at the University of Iowa in Johnson County.”
The turbine and the energy-saving heating and cooling systems have kept the college’s utility bills relatively flat through the past seven years, even as the square footage on the main campus along has grown by 35 percent.
“Right now, Kirkwood has 545,000 square feet of geothermal facilities. Another 140,000 square feet are currently under construction,” Kaldenberg states. “By August 2015, Kirkwood will be at 50 percent of all our facilities across all campuses and regional centers running on geo-thermal power. I don’t know of any other college campuses in the country with numbers that high.”
How much energy do you use each day? See your impact on the planet at myfootprint.org!