Rob:  Tremendous amounts of money and thought are being spent on finding new sources of energy.  But talk to most any expert and they will tell you the quickest and most efficient way for us to reach energy independence is just to use less.  We continue our look at Oklahoma’s emerging energy sector by examining energy conservation through innovation.  And we begin at a one-of-a-kind research facility on the campus of Oklahoma State University.
Brian Bendele:  Why spend money to flip a switch, when the sun is right outside?
Steven O’Hara:  Approximately 10% of the worldwide energy consumption is just in buildings in the United States for lighting.
Brian:  In fact, consumers and businesses spend 58 billion dollars a year to operate lights.  Steven O’Hara is a professor in the school of architecture at Oklahoma State University, and is working with a team to develop a 14-foot dome that will be used as a way to study natural lighting and how to build energy efficient structures.
Khaled Mansy:  The utilization of daylight, you can actually replace the use of electric light.
Brian:  Professor Khaled Mansy designed the massive structure with 342 lights, and a transparent inner dome, to provide as close to a real world situation as possible.
Mansy:  Students will build scale models of buildings or spaces, put them inside the dome, and then we simulate the sky conditions with the dome, so we can create these conditions to be able to test the building and different critical times in the year, like in the summer, and the spring, and the fall and in the winter.
Brian:  The data received will consider visibility as well as heating and cooling.  But it’s not just natural lighting that affects heating and cooling, it’s also the lighting system itself, something engineer Tom Gedra says many building owners run into with older systems.
Tom Gedra:  Probably the things that you hear most frequently for home use would be to replace incandescent bulbs, which are sort of notoriously inefficient because they generate light by getting so hot that they glow.  So a lot of the energy goes into creating heat that doesn’t turn into light.
Brian:  And the problem many face is by using these inexpensive incandescent light bulbs instead of these compact fluorescent light bulbs that use 75 percent less energy, and last 10 times longer.
Gedra:  A 27-watt compact fluorescent should be the same brightness as a hundred watt incandescent, so you’re saving 73 out of the hundred watts.
Brian:  And all of this information is relative to the price of energy and the amount used, something Manny Al-Harake, assistant director of the student union at Oklahoma State University, deals with every day. 
Manny Al-Harake:  About six years ago, we looked at the twisted bulb, what they call a twisted bulb.  We replaced that also, and we measured it, and it gave us an average of about 25 to 30 percent energy efficiency.  So if you look at the saving actual kilowatts, and the replacement cost, that gave us substantial savings.  
Brian:  The union changed to florescent lighting 15 years ago, and has since revamped the union adding more technology and lighting, but says because of the new lighting, the amount of energy used has been reduced.
Al-Harake:  Back in 1994-95, fiscal year, we were spending almost 5 million kilowatts in this building; and for this year, this last fiscal year, with all the additions that we did, we are spending 4.4 million kilowatts. 
Brian:  Numbers and bright ideas that ease the consumption of fossil fuels, and the strain on your wallet. 
Rob:  To see how some Oklahoma students are doing their part to conserve energy, go to the value added portion of our web page and look for Going Green.