Luke Macy, ASUW director of sustainability and University of Wyoming Master of Business Administration (MBA) student, is working toward making campus a more sustainable, energy efficient area.
In October of 2022, Macy had the idea to create an online program called Campus Heartbeat, designed to allow university students and faculty to see how much energy is being used on campus.
“(Campus Heartbeat) is just a way for students and faculty to see real time energy consumption and that could be through electricity, hot water, cold water, domestic water, and also our emissions data as well,” said Macy.
“It’s not necessarily a new concept, but it was a need that this university needed to be filled. Our energy managers on campus were actually working towards a tool like this, but they’re just a little bit understaffed,”
“So, I stepped up and built this tool to kind of fill that missing gap.”
Other universities around the country have created similar energy monitoring platforms, such as Arizona State and the University of California, Berkeley, as a way for students and faculty to be more mindful of energy use on campus.
“Part of tuition goes in the heating and cooling power in the buildings that [students] have classes in. And so the more that we can create energy efficient systems, the more that we can use part of our tuition to go towards other things like meal plans or better environments for living.”
Campus Heartbeat was free for Macy to create, on account of his background in programming. Right now, however, he is paying money out of his own pocket to keep it online and running. The School of Computing recently awarded Macy a grant so that he can hire a team of student research assistants to help work on the project.
“I had this idea back in the fall. I remember it being around the beginning of October,” he said.
“I was brainstorming, ‘what is the legacy project that I could build where once I graduate, this tool will still be supporting students?’ This meshed perfectly with the kind of movement that I wanted to bring to the university.”
Macy said that it took approximately 40 days to collect all of the data in order to create the platform. Specifically, 6.5 million records worth of energy consumption data.
“It was a really long process of processing the data and then building out the web app alone to present the data and to make it autonomous,” he said.
“It’s probably one of the hardest computer projects that I’ve worked on. So [I’m] really happy that people appreciate it. And I hope that other people find it useful.”
Campus Heartbeat had its first public launch during winter break. After Macy announced its release online, it began to gain a lot of traction around campus and in Laramie.
“If I could put everything into a nutshell, and say it all in one sentence, it would be that it’s mutually beneficial for the public to learn more about energy management,” he said.
“And it’s also beneficial for the university to potentially gain recommendations to try to dramatically improve fuel efficiency.”
Anyone who is interested in viewing Campus Heartbeat can find it online.
