Cornell calculates the cost of climate change

By Sharon Tregaskis

On a crystal-clear day in mid-January, with temperatures near freezing, Frank Perry parks his white pickup truck in the Alumni House lot, then hikes down past Noyes Lodge to the Beebe Lake shore. "There's two feet of slushice today," says the utilities project manager, looking at the sluggish water pooling at the base of a bulky metal contraption that evokes the massive trash compactor in Star Wars. "It plugs up everything." Even so, the slushy fluid is generating more than 200 kilowatts of electricity as it pours over the trash rack, through the intake valve, and down a 1,700-foot pen-stock, slamming into the turbines of Cornell's two-megawatt hydroelectric plant 145 feet below. Over the course of a year, that adds up to 2 percent of the University's electrical load. Most days, Perry monitors water levels at the Beebe Lake dam—and the volume of crud collecting in the trash rack—via web-cam from his office across campus. Once a week, he inspects in person.

Today everything looks fine at the intake, so Perry climbs back in his truck, wending past Risley Hall and the Undergraduate Admissions Office on Thurston Avenue to a pull-off near the Suspension Bridge, nearly a third of a mile downstream. He clambers down the 125 heavily salted wooden stairs that cling to the side of Fall Creek gorge, fits a key in the padlocked gate intended to deter the curious, and in minutes has descended more than 100 feet to a squat concrete-and-fieldstone building perched on a ledge a few feet above the creek bed.

From the Suspension Bridge, the 105-year-old, flat-roofed structure housing the hydroelectric plant looks abandoned. Perry opens the door, revealing banks of computers sprouting wires and gauges that monitor the flow of creek water below the building. A touch-screen display monitors the operation of a pair of turbines mounted in the floor and maintains the water level behind the Beebe Lake dam. "Hydro power is a really good thing for the University," Perry says over the deafening roar of the turbines. "It makes our electric meter run slower; otherwise, it's just dollars going down the creek."

Nationwide, renewable energy has gone from fringe concern to social tsunami in the span of a decade. Data on the rapid rate of climate change and the role of the American appetite for cheap, polluting fossil fuels in a range of ecological ills has garnered increasing media attention. The U.S. still generates a staggering volume of the greenhouse gas emissions credited with volatile weather patterns worldwide, and President Barack Obama has made energy independence a top priority of his administration. "No single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy," he declared in a speech days after his inauguration. "America's dependence on oil is one of the most serious threats that our nation has faced. It bankrolls dictators, pays for nuclear proliferation, and funds both sides of our struggle against terrorism. It puts the American people at the mercy of shifting gas prices, stifles innovation, and sets back our ability to compete. These urgent dangers to our national and economic security are compounded by the long-term threat of climate change, which, if left unchecked, could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe."

Philosophically, Cornell's commitment to efficiency and renewable energy stretches back to Ezra himself. The University's parsimonious founder built the first Beebe Lake dam in 1838 and subsequently provided for a waterwheel and generators north of Sibley Hall, a system that powered electric streetlights on campus and supplied excess power to the bustling town below in the late 1880s. Even today, Cornell remains the only American university with its own hydroelectric plant. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, efforts at energy efficiency on the Hill gained prominence, culminating with the Lake Source Cooling project, which has reduced the University's annual air conditioning load by 86 percent since it went online in 2000.