Greenhouse Gases

Gordon College strives to be on the cutting edge of both energy and natural resource use. Director of Plant Operations and Sustainability Paul Helgesen says, “We at Physical Plant take very seriously our role in overseeing how Gordon College impacts our local and global environment. We strive to make decisions every day to limit our use of fossil fuels, water and sewage. With a daytime population of approximately 1900 people, we have the impact of a small town, so we must be careful to manage our resources in a manner which would be pleasing to our Creator.”

Here are just some of the projects Gordon has participated in:

Gordon College has converted 95% of its buildings from oil and electricity to natural gas heating. As a result, this has greatly reduced our emission of greenhouse gases and keeps the groundwater safe from possible heating oil tank leaks.

A new generation of energy management systems have been installed to some of our larger buildings: Chase, Bennett, Jenks, Ferrin, Barrington and Lane Student Center. These transformations increase comfort, reduce greenhouse gases, and save funds in our energy budgets.

Gordon College has entered into a contract with Direct Energy to purchase “Renewable Resource” energy as provided in the Green-e Renewable National Standard for a portion on our purchased electricity. This will provide approximately 293MWs of our electricity per year.

Gordon College installed a 5.6 KW Photovoltaic system on the roof of Roosevelt Hall to provide electricity on campus. We are currently forgoing our RECs to count the electricity produced as green. This will produce about 8MWs per year.

Gordon College has natural gas use meters on all buildings. Electric meters or sub meters are on 75% of our buildings. All of Gordon's energy use and costs are tracked each month.

Demand Response Program: Gordon is participating in a load demand response program where we will shed electrical load during peak times of increased demand.

In the past six years we have completed 46 lighting retrofit projects across campus. 1,315 light fixtures have been replaced or retrofitted, including: