Danny Musher '10 gave the final twist on Rozie's last light bulb and turned to the resident of the Lockwood Plaza apartment community on Prairie Avenue.
"These should use about 25 percent less electricity," he said from behind a box of compact fluorescent lamps.
"Good, because last month my National Grid bill was over $50," said Rozie. "My sister, she's on a fixed income. How's she supposed to afford that?"
Musher and his partner Libby Kimzey '09.5 were in Rozie's home as part of Project 20/20, a joint partnership between Brown and Wal-Mart to help low-income families switch to energy-efficient CFLs and reduce their electric bills. The bulbs will save Providence residents over $750,000 in energy costs while significantly reducing carbon emissions, said Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Steven Hamburg, the founder of the project.
The project, which has installed close to 15,000 light bulbs in over 800 homes so far, began last year as a part of an effort to offset the University's carbon emissions by reducing energy use at Brown and in the Providence community. "Ultimately we want our behavior to be representative of how everyone should solve the (energy) problem," Hamburg said. "We used the CFL project as an example of how that could be done."
CFLs, which cost around $2 each, are more expensive than incandescent light bulbs but use less energy and last longer, saving money over the bulb's lifetime. The spiral-shaped bulbs have been around for almost 20 years, but new technological advancements have reduced their cost and improved the quality of their light, Hamburg said.
Despite the benefits of CFLs, Hamburg said convincing consumers to switch has been hard. Incandescent bulbs are cheap and produce a familiar yellow glow that's difficult to recreate with fluorescent lights. "If you replace the bulbs slowly, you'll see the change. It's not worse, it's just different," Hamburg said. "This is about getting people comfortable with the idea of change."
One thing Hamburg has going for him is that Project 20/20 distributes and installs the bulbs for free. He has been working with Wal-Mart for the last few years to push the sales of CFLs in the retailer's stores and has convinced the company to donate $100,000 along with $50,000 in light bulbs towards Project 20/20. The University contributed an additional $100,000.
Project 20/20 began distributing light bulbs last spring but picked up momentum this summer, hiring more than 25 students to switch out incandescent light bulbs for CFLs in local homes. The project is designed to serve low-income residents making around $45,000 per household, Hamburg said, but accepts anyone that requests the service.
"We let people self-identify," he said. "You don't have to come show us your income tax form."
The organization has been working with the Providence Housing Authority and local churches to identify low-income communities and inform residents about the project, said Kimzey, the project's external coordinator. Rozie, the Lockwood Plaza resident, found out and signed up for the program during a presentation at her sister's apartment building.
Though Kimzey and Musher had only made two appointments to change bulbs that day, word spread quickly around Lockwood Plaza. Several residents had already heard about the program, but had neglected to sign up before hearing that the students were nearby. Others encountered Kimzey and Musher while standing in front of their homes, talking to friends.
"Ok, how much?" asked Juan, after listening to Kimzey explain how the light bulbs will reduce his electric bill and save him money. "They're free - gratis," Kimzey said, before being invited into Juan's tidy apartment to replace his light bulbs.
The project installs the CFLs personally, rather than distributing them to residents, as a way of developing a dialogue about the project and ensuring that recipients do not resell them. Replacing the incandescent bulbs all at once also maximizes the benefits of the CFLs and allows people to see an immediate change in their electric bill, Musher said.
"We want to go in and talk to the residents. We're trying to create a consumer behavioral shift," Musher said. "We're not just dropping off bulbs and going. We want to be a face in the community educating people."
Entering hundreds of people's homes does lead to some strange encounters. Musher has been offered everything from steak tortillas to Corona, and once spent an afternoon being driven all around Providence to deliver CFLs to the homes of one enthusiastic bulb-recipient's relatives. Encounters with animal lovers tend to leave the most lasting impressions.
"There definitely have been a lot of Puerto Rican bird ladies," he said. "They're really nice but they have an unnatural number of birds."
The students, who receive $10 an hour for the job, always work in pairs for safety reasons. On average, they replace 17.8 light bulbs per house, though residential communities like Lockwood plaza require fewer because they are often lit by fluorescent overhead lights, Kimzey said. Spending hours unscrewing hot light bulbs and neatly folding cardboard bulb packages does take its toll - Kimzey stopped doing installations briefly to recover from a repetitive motion injury. The organization is still thinking about what to do with the thousands of incandescent light bulbs they've removed. Jesse Coen '10 said she plans to use about 10,000 of them to construct a large Lite-Brite, painted to form a pixelated image for a visual arts project. Ian Sims '10 said he's been thinking about organizing an afternoon where project members get together and glue the bulbs together to form a CFL-shaped sculpture.
Hamburg said he has been contacted about the project by several other universities, and sees it as the first step in a larger shift towards increased energy efficiency in the United States. "If we're going to create a low-carbon economy, this is one of the steps where we learn to crawl," he said. "Most people can reduce energy demand by 30 to 40 percent with existing technology."
He said he would like to create a project to swap regular thermostats for programmable ones and to replace old furnaces with more energy efficient models, though these changes would require another level of funding and expertise to execute.
"Most homes could reduce their carbon emissions by 30 percent and make money doing it," Hamburg said. "People are buying less-than-efficient appliances."
Hamburg also said there is more that the University can do to improve energy efficiency on campus. The last time Hamburg visited President Ruth Simmons' house and the Corporation room, he said, they were both lit by incandescent bulbs. "There's a certain hypocrisy that needs to be confronted," he said. "It's about making choices."
