Green Power On Campus

University students across the state are leading a push towards energy conservation.

The University of Tennessee is now the Tennessee Valley Authority’s largest purchaser of clean, renewable energy, or Green Power. That’s the result of a program of environmental initiatives paid for and requested by students on the Knoxville campus.

This fall, at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro and Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, about 90-percent of students voting in nearly identical referendums said they’d like to increase their student fees by 8-dollars per semester to fund programs similar to UT’s.

Tennessee Tech spokeswoman Monica Grippen says the referendum specified how the money would be used.

“Half of that would be used to buy mega blocks of the green power and the university would just buy as many blocks of power as we can with the available money that we’ve raised. The rest of the money would be used to help with energy efficiency projects on campus. One of the projects we’ve been looking at for a while now is replacing some of the lights on our baseball field with more energy efficient lighting.”

The MTSU proposal would designate 5-dollars per student for green power buys and 3 for efficiency measures.

Students at both schools are now working to secure support from their faculties and administrations, who must in turn ask the Board of Regents for approval to raise fees at their June meeting.