The effectiveness of campus energy reduction initiatives has lagged recently, according to recent data and observations by environmental groups. Do-it-in-the-Dark was initiated in 2007 as a monthly competition among wood-frame houses to decrease energy usage. In 2010, Physical Plant installed monitors to display graphs comparing daily energy consumption in residential dorms.

Both energy-saving programs are based on a study conducted in 2005 at Oberlin College, where energy usage decreased by about 35 percent during the competition and by about 55 percent when energy monitors were installed. However, Wesleyan has yet to see comparable changes in energy consumption.

Associate Director of Utilities Management at Physical Plant and Chair of the Sustainability Advisory Group for Environmental Stewardship (SAGES) Energy Subcommittee Peter Staye has maintained data for Do-it-in-the-Dark since 2007. According to this data, the biggest change occurred between 2008 and 2009, when total energy usage decreased four times as much as in other years. The success of that year has not been matched since.

“I remember the class of 2009 very vividly,” Staye said. “They were very active students. There were three or four of them that were really engaged and worked really hard throughout the wood frames to make it work.”

Wood frame houses are assessed in their usage of gas, oil, and electric energy in relation to the size of their house and the outdoor temperature, as well as in comparison with their consumption in previous years.

“I personally think that we need to increase the awareness of the competition and students’ energy consumption,” wrote SAGES intern Marjorie Dodson ’13 in an email to The Argus. “I think that right now, it’s a little hard to tell what exactly the graphs mean and where your dorm stands relative to the ideal.”

Since the implementation of the dorm monitors, students have questioned their effectiveness in encouraging the University community to decrease its energy consumption.

“Last year, those energy monitors were inaccurate and sometimes not even on,” wrote former Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) representative Nicole Okai ’14 in an email to The Argus. “People need to be more aware of [them].”

Nicholson 5, 5.5, and 6 won the short-term competition among traditional dorms last April. However, SAGES member and former EON Co-Coordinator Melody Oliphant ’13 recalled that when she was a Nics resident, she noticed no real effort on her dorm’s part to decrease their use of energy.

“I think that the biggest problem is incentivizing the program for the staff members involved who are overseeing the program, and for the students,” she said.

There is currently no published data on how the installation of the monitors has affected energy use in traditional dorms. Although increasing sustainability is an ongoing, campus-wide effort, some believe that a lack of student initiative is causing major setbacks.

“People have this misconceived notion that Wesleyan, as an institution, is already so sustainable that they don’t need to do anything individually to help increase our sustainability,” Oliphant said.

Oliphant also attributed the program’s ineffectiveness to insufficient campus-wide management.

“There’s no full-time sustainability coordinator on campus, so the task of monitoring any sort of sustainability initiative or overseeing it is left to a group of people on campus who care about this issue as a personal passion of theirs, but they’re not being paid to work on any sort of initiative,” she said.

Some students would like to see more cooperation between the administration and students, and believe that efforts to reduce energy are lagging among members of both groups.

“Last year on the WSA, some great money-saving ideas that were great for the Earth got skeptical reactions from the administration,” Okai wrote. “I feel that everyone needs to be on the same page.”

According to Oliphant, campus energy-saving initiatives continue to cause frustration among both students and faculty and staff.

“Do-it-in-the-Dark manifests as a source of contention,” Oliphant said. “I think the faculty and staff see it as a sort of oblivious unwillingness of students to engage in energy reduction.”

Staye said that in order for the program to succeed, the reduction of personal energy use must be a student priority.

“It all depends on how active the students are and how much they market the program to everyone, how much they make it important,” he said. “I personally believe that it is all attitude.”