The Sustainable Development Office intends to provide all members of TU Darmstadt with vital information concerning energy at our University in addition to useful tips on saving energy on a monthly basis. Furthermore, there will be various events, platforms and activities providing opportunities for discourse and sharing information.

Apart from structural and technical measures in addition to central decisions by the Executive Board regarding the energy crisis, all of us can contribute to achieve our energy-saving goal by using energy more conscientiously. Each kilowatt hour that we save, we do not have to optimise!

It may be easier to change our behaviour if we can actually see the difference it makes. That is why we showed the amount of energy TU Darmstadt receives from its energy provider while also indicating our energy-saving goal in these diagrams. Each month, these diagrams will be updated to show how far we will have come and if we will have to do more to achieve our goal. The regular updates regarding our energy consumption can be seen on our dedicated “Energy & Resources” webpage.

This campaign has already started! During the kick-off of the GetTUgether benches that are intended to encourage discourse, the Sustainable Development Office has talked to students, employees and staff about everyday habits that we would like to change to save energy. Many ideas have been collected, such as using vegetable rinsing water for watering plants, wearing caps indoors and switching off WIFI overnight. By tossing tin cans, players could symbolically throw out old habits to make room for new ones. The winners got small thermometers to help us check if we heat our rooms too much. Simply by setting the room temperature 2°C lower than in the past, we can save around 12% energy.