Summer interns ID more than $350 million in energy savings

How productive were your summer interns on your company's behalf? The 51 business school students who participated in the 2010 Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Climate Corps program managed to find more than $350 million in potential energy efficiency improvements on behalf of their host companies. That's almost seven times the amount that was uncovered by the 2009 class, which consisted of 26 fellows from top-ranked business schools. The total identified during the lifetime of the program has been $439 million.

The savings identified in 2010 alone represent a potential reduction of 678 million kilowatt hours per year, which could run 60,000 average American homes.

This year, there were 47 host companies including the likes of Bloomberg, eBay, McDonald's Pepsi, Verizon and Xerox. The full list of companies that participated, along with the savings that each company might realize, is published on the main link I've listed above. The business schools that were represented included the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Duke University, the University of California at Berkeley, New York University and the University of Virginia.

Some of the efforts highlighted by EDF included:

• A project at Verizon to evaluate the impact of a thermal ice storage system at the Verizon headquarters in New York. The recommendations could save up to $9.16 million.
• A lighting efficiency project for HCA Healthcare in Nashville, Tenn., that could help the company cut lighting energy costs by up to 30 percent, or $7.8 million if rolled out across the company's hospitals.
• An analysis of the impact of installing power management software, lighting retrofits and replaced old computers at the San Jose, Calif., headquarters of eBay. The project could save $1.5 million.

Of course, it's up to the businesses themselves to take action, but you get the idea. EDF is already recruiting both potential fellows and potential host companies for 2011.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com