No longer a competition, Power Down Challenge wraps up

It’s time to turn down the thermostat and find a dark room to do your homework. That’s right — Wednesday is the culmination of the Power Down Challenge, a campus-wide effort to reduce energy usage.

This year’s event is much different than it has been in the past. The old model — which Penn’s Sustainability Office has used for the past six years — was an Inter-House competition to use the least power as a dorm during the entire month of February. This year, however, the office, along with student Eco-Reps, decided to stay away from the competitive side of the challenge.

“The competition aspect was a good idea in theory, but in reality, it was not,” Eco-Rep and College freshman Zachary Rissman said. “People were going to other houses and using a lot of energy to help their own house win. That’s not how it should work.”

Last year, the majority of college houses actually used more energy during the month-long challenge than they normally did.

“When you think about how energy is used, it really doesn’t make sense for it to be a competition,” Eco-Rep and Wharton and College junior Austin Bream said. “We interact with energy in more than one building.”

This year’s Power Down Challenge focused on information sessions and talks to educate students on their energy consumption throughout the month of February. The actual challenge to use as little energy as possible was shortened to a single day: Wednesday, Feb. 24.

“We made intentional changes to really broaden the program and to move away specifically from the building against building competition into a more collaborative model,” Sustainability Outreach Manager Julian Goresko said. “We felt like we’d run our course with that model. We’ve done all that we can do with it. In order to keep things fresh and exciting, we wanted to move to a different type of campaign.”

The Sustainability Office hopes that it will help increase awareness about how behavioral changes can have an impact on energy usage.

“Some of this is just designed to raise awareness about your use of energy,” Environmental Sustainability Director Dan Garofalo said. “Putting off laundry until tomorrow is not going to save energy in the long run, but by making that point, we are making the connection between people’s activities and our ability to conserve energy.”

That mission — reducing energy usage across campus — will not end with the finale of this year’s Power Down Challenge.

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