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July 07, 2008, 02:14 PM ET
Oklahoma Colleges Will Hike Tuition to Keep Up With Energy Costs
The Tulsa World reports that colleges in Oklahoma are feeling pain from energy costs and will raise tuition this fall to help make ends meet.
“State colleges estimated they will have cost increases of $43 million in the coming year, but they received about the same amount of money from the state as last year,” the reporter, April Marciszewski, writes.
Oklahoma State University and other colleges have hired consultants to help find ways to save money on energy. Jeff Stewart, the Oklahoma State University physical-plant director of engineering and utilities, laid out the damage for the World. “The fuel portion of OSU’s electric bill has been about $680,000 for the first half of 2008, Stewart estimated, and he expects that subcharge to increase about 75 percent this month. The university’s gas bill increased from about $5.2 million for July 2006-May 2007 to $5.6 million for July 2007-May 2008. Stewart thinks the gas bill would have been even higher without the energy conservation program, which OSU reported in April had saved about $1.4 million in five months.”
The article notes that colleges in Oklahoma are starting to install geothermal heat pumps—highly efficient technology that uses the constant temperature of the ground to heat and cool buildings. The technology is very popular in Europe, particularly in Sweden and Austria. The International Ground Source Heat Pump Association, a nonprofit organization that supports the geothermal industry, is based at Oklahoma State. Jim Bose, an engineering professor who is the executive director of the association, said in an interview with The Chronicle that after preaching the gospel of geothermal for years, he is starting to see people pay attention.
Still, he said, adoption by college is “like 90-weight oil in the wintertime”—which we take to mean “slow.”
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