Green Libraries

Energy efficiency tips, incentives, and rebates for government facilities that are Ameren Illinois customers.

Save money and energy by taking advantage of assessments, incentives and building optimization for your public sector facilities.

Comprehensive database of state, local, utility, and federal incentives and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. Established in 1995 and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, DSIRE is an ongoing project of the N.C. Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Excellent resource for locating funding for energy efficiency projects.

Hosted by the University of Illinois EnergySense Resilience Center, this page is a compilation of state and federal funding opportunities for clean energy, including energy efficiency incentives. Public libraries should qualify under the public sector incentives programs.

Many ancient libraries in Italy are housed in historical buildings, only a few in former churches and monasteries. Newly built libraries mostly comply with the requirements of sustainability, energy saving and renewable energy use, but this does not occur for existing ones, especially when they belong to the historical cultural heritage. Historical library buildings have good mass and thermal inertia but often have inadequate windows with low light transmission value. Lighting systems are often without control and thus cause poor lighting conditions. Our present research concerns the energy sustainability assessment of retrofit operations for lighting in an existing historical university library, focusing on lighting quality, adequate lighting conditions for visual tasks, vision ergonomics and well-being, and guaranteeing the preventive conservation and protection of heritage books. This case study is very particular, because it concerns a Florentine historical monastery which is now a university library. Our proposed method introduces an optimal toolset for lighting design solutions with the aim of sustainability. The library indoor space was procedurally decomposed into illumination volumes according to different occupant activities and visual tasks and different use areas. This method is extensible to all similar cultural heritage case, but also existing old buildings and current designs.

Blog post for Illinois Library Association Connector outlining six steps to a more energy efficient building.

Covers all aspects of energy efficient buildings and equipment. Focus is office buildings, but much of the information also applies to libraries.

This handbook will give you the information you need to plan an energy-management strategy that works for your building, making it more energy efficient.

Energy Star, a cooperative effort of the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the federal government's energy efficiency portal. Includes a wealth of information on all aspects of energy efficiency, including statistics.

Contains a wealth of resources for all types of commercial buildings. Look under Resources by Audience for information specific to schools and colleges and universities.

An Energy Treasure Hunt is a two- to three-day event that engages employees in identifying low-cost energy savings opportunities from behavioral, operational, and maintenance actions. This 31-page guidebook provides step-by-step guidance on how to organize and execute an Energy Treasure Hunt. Examples from ENERGY STAR partner organizations and checklists are provided to illustrate practices and help with implementation. This guide complements EPA's ENERGY STAR Guidelines for Energy Management.

Provides a general formula for estimating energy consumption of appliances, along with a list of typical wattages for various appliances.

Building operation and maintenance programs specifically designed to enhance operating efficiency of HVAC and lighting systems can save 5 to 20 percent of the energy bills without significant capital investment.The 15 Best Practices described in this booklet are strategies that facility managers, energy managers and property managers can use to integrate energy-efficient operation into their organizations' O&M programs and to obtain support from senior management.

Offers suggestions for transforming existing library buildings to make them more sustainable, with a focus on energy efficiency.

This report focuses on energy behavior programs in the workplace, which aim to reduce building energy use through change in employees’ attitudes and behaviors. The report reviews five energy behavior projects across the U.S. and Canada. Energy savings of the studied energy behavior projects are from 4% (savings from a stand-alone behavior program) to nearly 75% (savings from a comprehensive project in which a behavior program is a component). The report also identifies four intervention strategies shared by the reviewed energy behavior projects: (1) setting the tone with strong support from upper management and good program branding; (2) building a team consisting of a stakeholder-oriented program committee and peer champions selected from building occupants; (3) employing communication tools including e-mail, Web sites, prompts, posters and public meetings; and (4) deploying key engagement techniques such as feedback, benign peer pressure, competition, rewards, and reference to appropriate social norms.

Old buildings are being recycled into libraries all over the world. The process of rededication of a building with a former different usage into a library is quite obviously a matter of recycling. The transformation of an existing building with a prior non-library function into a library brings the challenge and the opportunity for sustainable thinking in library planning. As non-renewable resources are decreasing, reusing and recycling are going to become increasingly necessary in the future. The recycling of old buildings means reducing the ecological footprint of library buildings in a cost-effective and efficient way. Beside ‘green’ aspects like water conservation, energy conservation, recycled or sustainable building materials, indoor air quality, and solar power from photo-voltaic panels, the planning of an adaptive reuse is a very different task than the planning of a library in a totally new building. Some best practice case studies from Germany, and other countries in Europe are presented.

The less energy an appliance like a refrigerator or dishwasher uses, the less it costs to run — which means more money in your pocket each year. The EnergyGuide label is the yellow tag you’ll find attached to most home appliances, and it tells you how much energy that appliance uses. Here’s what to know about using the EnergyGuide label when you shop. Useful when replacing appliances in employee break areas.

Researchers have been quantifying energy savings from lighting controls in commercial buildings for more than 30 years. This study provides a meta-analysis of estimates of energy savings identified in the literature—240 savings estimates from 88 papers and case studies, categorized into daylighting strategies, occupancy strategies, personal tuning, and institutional tuning. Beginning with an overall average of savings estimates by control strategy, this paper adds successive analytical filters to identify potential biases introduced to the estimates by different analytical approaches. Based on the meta-analysis, the best estimates of average energy savings potential are 24% for occupancy, 28% for daylighting, 31% for personal tuning, 36% for institutional tuning, and 38% for multiple approaches. The results suggest that simulations significantly overestimate (by at least 10%) the average savings obtainable from daylighting in actual buildings.

The purpose of this guide is to provide the Operations and Maintenance (O&M)/Energy manager and practitioner, with useful information about O&M management, technologies, energy and water efficiency, and cost-reduction approaches.

This document provides standard definitions of performance metrics and methods to determine them for the energy performance of building interior lighting systems. It can be used for existing buildings and for proposed buildings. The primary users for whom these documents are intended are building energy analysts and technicians who design, install, and operate data acquisition systems, and who analyze and report building energy performance data. Typical results from the use of this procedure are

Provides basic information about power and energy, along with examples of simple electricity and natural gas calculations, which are useful when trying to calculate baseline energy use.

This program assists federal agencies with using energy wisely. Includes information on purchasing energy efficient products, deploying renewable energy technologies, identifying funding opportunities, and inventorying and managing greenhouse gases. Although federal agencies are the target audience, these resources will also be useful to library administrators.

One goal of effective O&M is to achieve the intent of the original building design team, i.e., so that building systems deliver services (including the appropriate amount of outside air) to building occupants. O&M is also the discipline through which long-term goals of economy, energy efficiency, resource conservation, and pollution prevention can be achieved, while meeting the comfort, health, and safety requirements of the tenants.