For the past few months, Indiana University students have been helping 14 cities in the state to do greenhouse gas inventories. The idea is for cities to look at which sectors emit the most gases that contribute to climate change and try to make them greener.
Vic Kelson is the director of City of Bloomington utilities. He shows Savannah Rodrigue — the IU student doing Bloomington’s greenhouse gas inventory — around a booster station. It helps the city pump water out to where it’s needed.
"Now, this booster station uses about $20,000 a month of electricity. We were able to offset about 5 percent of that with the solar panel array," Kelson says.
Bloomington’s local government operations make up less than 10 percent of the city’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. But of that 10 percent, Rodrigue found that most of the emissions come from moving and treating water and wastewater.
