Alliance for a Sustainable Future Hosts Truly Green St. Patrick’s Day at GW

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In the artistic community of Belfast, Northern Ireland, where John D'Arcy came up as a musician and songwriter, art wasn't a hobby but a force for social commentary and change. The participatory vocal ensemble he founded, HIVE Choir, uses catharsis as an artistic tool, drawing on found texts-often Northern Irish poetry and mythology-as well as its members' most urgent preoccupations to create music through improvisational practice. A song might evolve from the group "screaming for 30 seconds about an issue."

The issues at stake are both personal and ecological. Northern Ireland is home to Lough Neagh, the United Kingdom's largest lake and one of the area's primary water sources, which in recent years has been overcome by toxic algae blooms largely caused by the inflow of agricultural waste. In a performance piece last year, HIVE used the human voice to lament the lake's pollution, to imagine new cleansing rituals built on ancient traditions and to use water as "a mirror to how humanity is treating the natural environment."

D'Arcy, a lecturer in digital media at Queen's University (QU) Belfast as well as an artist and researcher, shared his experience on a panel during the George Washington University's St. Patrick's Day Sustainability Celebration: Universities and Communities Creating a Greener Future. Hosted by the GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future(ASF) with QU Belfast, University College Cork (UCC) and the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Lowell, the daylong celebration included expert panel discussions, sustainability tours, interactive workshops and more.

When ASF was established in 2023, it became a key player in GW's ambitious slate of sustainability goals, Interim Provost John Lach said in his introductory remarks Tuesday afternoon. Many of these have since been achieved, including a 40% reduction in emissions, a prohibition in single-use plastic purchases, and becoming the ninth American university to earn a platinum rating from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS).

GW's commitment to sustainability extends "beyond our operations and our physical spaces" into the spheres of international collaboration and intellectual leadership, Lach said. It was a sign of that commitment, he said, that GW and QU Belfast had signed a Letter of Intent for collaboration the previous day. The letter advances the institutions' existing relationship, which includes sending second-year GW students to spend a fall semester at QU Belfast as part of the Global Bachelor's Program, and opens the door for potential new opportunities for joint research activities, faculty and student exchange, and collaboration and curricular coordination at the graduate level. Like GW, officials said, QU Belfast is deeply committed to sustainability, forming a strong basis for future collaborations.

"Sustainability is truly a worldwide team effort, and GW is grateful to have such wonderful partners around the globe," Lach said.

Interdisciplinary, international collaboration is necessary to solve the complex challenges posed by climate change, ASF Executive Director Donna Attanasio said. Universities, in particular, can become sustainability leaders by learning from one another and leveraging their strengths in research, education and community partnership.

"If we're going to create a sustainable future, we're going to have to work across many diverse fields of thought [and] use diverse skills," Attanasio said. "Research and teaching are the foundation of developing a generation of leaders armed with facts and capable of critical thinking and understanding complex systems."

In the afternoon's first panel, representatives from the celebration's four host universities-all of which are STARS-ranked-discussed what their own institutions are doing for sustainability on campus and in their home communities.

While the universities' approaches differ due to their physical situations and regulatory environments, some concerns and priorities were universal. These included the primacy of community leadership and the importance of translating research excellence into societal impact. Brian Ó Gallachóir, director of UCC's Sustainability Institute, said the ethos of UCC's sustainability mission was to be "student-led, research-informed and practice-focused."

For GW, being the largest private owner of land in the District is both "challenging and powerful," said Mansi Talwar, the university's executive director for utilities, engineering and energy. It allows the university to "contribute to [sustainability] policy and implementation" in a meaningful way, but also creates an obligation for responsible stewardship. In the next few years, she said, sustainability will continue as "part of [GW's] DNA" as projects like carbon mitigation for existing buildings are mapped out and implemented.

The day's second panel looked at the explosion of data centers in the United States and worldwide and examined possible sustainable pathways for the increasing demands of artificial intelligence and big data.

Juliette Rooney-Varga, director of UMass Lowell's Climate Change Initiative and co-director of the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy, pointed out that the decision to use finite resources, including energy, to support the expansion of data centers and AI is a societal choice, not an inevitability. The technology was "built for humans by humans," she said. "We have an opportunity to steer it if we remember our agency and remember our goals."

Payman Deghanian, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of GW's Smart Grid Laboratory,explained why exactly data centers' energy needs are so high: the dual, linked demands of computing and cooling, as well as the need for reliable backup power.

"Data centers are effectively a warehouse of IT infrastructure and servers that run continuously to support all our internet activities, search engines, AI models, video streaming, financial transactions, everything," Deghanian said. "We are dealing now with servers that run at full utilization, most of the time around the clock."

Almost all the energy used for these computing tasks turns into heat, Deghanian explained. And since sensitive electronic equipment can't function if it overheats, data centers also have to use a tremendous amount of power to maintain temperature and humidity control. "As the computing load increases, the cooling demand also rises nonlinearly."

As a result, these centers consume a huge percentage of energy in the areas in which they are established. In Ireland, data centers are responsible for about 22% of all power consumption, said David Rooney, dean of internationalization and reputation at QU Belfast's School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. That outsized demand collided with the limitations of the Irish energy infrastructure: "The grid couldn't catch up with the speed of the rollout." The result was major community pushback and a temporary moratorium on new data center grid connections.

To deal with the industry's challenges, researchers at GW are working on solutions and decision support tools that data centers can use to align their operations with renewable energy, said Howie Huang, professor of computer and electrical engineering at GW Engineering. "We should approach this problem in a systematic way," Huang said. He and Deghanian use a "nested approach," looking at energy-consuming interactions within servers, between servers and other equipment in the building, between the building and the grid and in the grid itself to identify opportunities for increased efficiency.

GW alumnus Leandro Alves, co-founder and principal of Falvez Energy/WindHQ, explained how the functions of various types of data centers affect how and when they require grid support. He explained that his company paired data centers with wind generation facilities in Texas to fully utilize energy that could not be profitably transmitted to the grid. Doing so, he said, required a legislative change that would otherwise have barred this more efficient operating mode. This case study illustrated the value of multidisciplinary thinking, in this case including law, energy market structure, computer operations and power generation development.

The afternoon's final panel, moderated by Corcoran School of the Arts and Design Director Lauren Onkey, examined how sustainability can be expressed through the arts. D'Arcy's fellow panelists were Renata Philippe, lead designer and founder of Black Squirrel, and artist and city planner Andrea Limauro, a flood resilience planner for Washington, D.C.

For Limauro, whose day job involves making practical plans for the concrete impact of climate change for a D.C. population that is "culturally very ready for conversations about climate and environment," art helped enable conversation with people outside that ideological sphere. He spent almost 200 hours creating a large-scale waterfront mural last year, during which time he had many conversations with tourists. "People who would probably never have talked to me about climate approached me because I was painting."

"They probably regret talking to me," he said with a laugh. "But that's what it takes. We have to get into more uncomfortable conversations."

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