To: Vincent Boudreau, President

From: Radley Lupiano

Subject: Improvement of College’s Carbon Footprint.

Date: February 6, 2019

The purpose of this memo is to bring to your attention the large waste of electricity and gas that the college uses, and to present solutions that will both reduce our carbon footprint as well as save money

Summary

Our campus uses a lot of electricity and gas to run our facilities which is very costly and detrimental to the environment. There are many ways to cut down our power usage as a college, thus saving money on electricity and gas, being able to invest it elsewhere, and reduce our carbon footprint.

Discussion

The City College of New York has a very large campus with multiple buildings. Because of its size it uses a lot of electricity and fuel to stay running. In the U.S. an average building, uses approximately 17.3 kilo-watt-hours of electricity and 31.8 cubic feet of natural gas per square foot. The North Academic Center alone is approximately 150,000 sq. ft., which racks up a large bill for just one of the buildings on campus. According to ConEdison’s rates, the North Academic Center uses approximately 52,000$ worth of electricity in one year, and almost 11,000$ worth of natural gas in one year. Taking into consideration the other buildings on campus, while they may be smaller than the NAC hey still use a sizeable amount of power. If we were able to cut down power usage in the NAC by just 10% we could save around 7,000 dollars, which could be put towards investing in other, more important parts of the college.

Not only does it cost a lot of money to power all these buildings, it also has a large impact on the environment. Today, global warming is becoming a more and more pressing issue as we continue to pollute the environment, and it is starting to become a serious threat. Having such a large power usage as a college has quite a heavy toll on the environment. Working on reducing electricity usage will help the environment and even though we are small when compared to the rest of the country, everyone’s part counts.

Recommendation

Most buildings use a lot of electricity that is wasteful and not needed. According to the Energy Information Administration, approximately 25% of electricity used is allocated towards space heating and 10% is allocated towards lighting, which when combined is a large amount of our total electricity usage. While it is hard to cutdown costs on heating, it is very easy to cutdown costs on lighting. When walking through buildings such as the NAC, I often notice that there are many classrooms that are vacant but still have the lights on. Encouraging teachers to shut off lights can help reduce the electricity usage. A more efficient option would be to invest in motion detectors for lights so they can automatically shut off when rooms are empty, saving up to 40% of the electricity that is used on lighting in the building, saving approximately 3000$. It is hard to reduce the amount of gas usage however as a lot of it is mandatory, but if we can cut down a lot on electricity it will help cut costs and reduce our Carbon footprint. Thank you for your consideration and I hope to hear back from you soon.

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Here is the reflection I wrote on the assignment after completing it:

The second assignment for Writing in Engineering was to write a memo to the president of CCNY giving a suggestion to help improve the college. In my assignment, I chose to write about how to reduce the power usage in CCNY which would both help the environment and save money. I chose to write about that because I have always cared about protecting our environment, and I feel everyone else should too, as it is our home after all. I wanted to be able to help the environment on a larger scale than just my own private actions. However, in my letter I focused heavily on how cutting power usage could save a lot of money, because from a corporate viewpoint, money is usually more important than the environment, and I figured focusing on money would be more convincing. I feel I did a good job explaining what the benefits of saving power were for the college, but I do not think I provided enough ways to save power. In my paragraph suggesting changes I only gave a few suggestions, which may not have been appealing much. The memo would have been better if I gave a wide variety of choices in which to save power with so if there were a few the president didn’t like, there would still be options that would be considered. With few options my memo wasn’t as effective as it could have been.

Writing this memo has helped me improve my skills as a writer. This was a new form of writing assignment for me, so I had to adjust to the style and proper tone for writing it. Writing in this style and receiving critique from my peers helped me understand what a memo should be like and help me edit and revise y work for it to be fitting of the style. The memo assignment also made me focus more on understanding my audience and make sure what I was writing about was tailored towards my audience, which is a crucial skill in all writing. Overall, the memo assignment helped me improve my writing skills because it was anew style of writing that introduced new ideas to me.