GP: They're All Doing It (At Least on Campus)

["Tom Gray" <tomgray@igc.org>]

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From: PennFuture [mailto:pennfuture@pennfuture.org]
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 5:23 PM
Subject: PennFuture's E-Cubed - They're All Doing it Now (At Least on
Campus)
__________________________________

April 25, 2002
Vol. 4, No. 8

THEY'RE ALL DOING IT NOW
(AT LEAST ON CAMPUS)

Eating goldfish? That was in the forties. Sock hopping? The fifties.
Sex? The sixties. Streaking? The seventies. Planning how to spend all
the money they’d make? The eighties. Getting online? The nineties. Many
of us even remember when Earth Day was a big deal on campus.

On several Pennsylvania college campuses this year, Earth Day was marked
by the purchases of renewable electricity. With the announcements of
eight more college and university purchases last week, 26 college and
university campuses in Pennsylvania have now purchased energy generated
from the new wind farms in Somerset and Fayette counties. The wind farms
were developed by Atlantic Renewable Energy and Zilkha Renewable Energy,
with Exelon buying the wholesale production, and Community Energy, Inc.,
a 1999 start-up that specializes in marketing electricity generated from
wind, making the retail sales. Specifically, the purchasers are buying
energy tags or certificates that reflect the value of non-polluting
electricity generated from the wind.


WHICH SCHOOLS AND HOW MUCH?
Together, 12 purchases totaling more than 50 million kilowatt-hours of
electricity generated from wind, are now serving many of the major
campuses in Pennsylvania. (For table, please see attachment, or our
website, http://www.pennfuture.org under Pressroom and Publications.)

Fourteen additional schools are part of the State System of Higher
Education, which are part of the State of Pennsylvania’s green power
contract. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania purchases 5 percent of its
load, or about 50 million kWh, from renewable energy sources, also from
Community Energy, Inc. About 20 percent of the Commonwealth’s renewable
energy purchase is from wind generation, or about 1 percent of the total
load. The remainder of the renewable portion of the contract is served
by hydro and landfill methane, and includes some solar power. The
contract supplies power for many Commonwealth agencies, including the
State System of Higher Education campuses at Bloomsburg, California,
Cheyney, Clarion, East Stroudsburg, Edinboro, Indiana, Kutztown, Lock
Haven, Mansfield, Millersville, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock and West
Chester.


THE IMPACT
50 million kWh of electricity generated from typical grid power would
annually produce about:

*3.0 million pounds of nitrogen oxide, a main cause of smog or ozone
pollution; *8.8 million pounds of sulfur dioxide, a main ingredient of
acid rain; *1.17 billion pounds of carbon dioxide, the primary global
warming gas.

That’s a lot of pollution — pollution that’s avoided by buying energy
created from renewable sources. For example, buying renewable avoids
about the same amount of carbon dioxide as taking 117,000 cars off the
road or planting over 65 million trees. Even when Earth Day was a big
deal on campus, no one ever planted 65 million trees!


WHY ARE THEY DOING IT AND HOW CAN THEY AFFORD IT?
The answers suggest a pretty simple, eminently practical formula and
that it’s time for other users — both large and small — to follow their
lead.

These colleges and universities see it as a basic part of their
organizational activities. Universities educate students to be
responsible members of the community as well as community leaders. They
also conduct research, teach science and other disciplines, and develop
public policy solutions. As research increasingly demonstrates the
environmental, public health, and economic harm of conventional electric
generation, it’s hard not to practice what is being preached.

Here are some explanations, straight from the source:

*Tom Kingston, Vice President for Finance and Administration at Franklin &
Marshall: “We plan to make wind energy a core part of a new
student-faculty initiated program to conserve energy and save the
environment.”

*Thomas Kepple, Juniata College President: “The best way we can show our
commitment and ethical responsibility to the environment is to begin
purchasing wind energy today.”

*Allegheny College President Richard Cook: “Colleges and universities
have a special obligation and role to play in the research, development,
and demonstration of new technologies that will improve both our economy
and the environment and that will reduce our dependence on foreign
sources of energy —whether that be oil, gas or uranium.”

*Penn State University’s Ford Stryker, Manager of Environmental Strategy
for Finance and Business: “Wind energy is great for Pennsylvania and the
economy. It creates jobs, boosts income for farmers, and at the same
time returns former strip mine land to productive use. Homegrown, wind
energy contributes to U.S. energy independence and self-sufficiency. We
hope this Penn State commitment will inspire others to do the right
thing and buy wind energy.”


GETTING THERE
The formula for switching a major institution to renewable energy
includes leadership, building institutional support, and finding
budgetary room. Perhaps surprising to many, leadership appears to be the
biggest initial hurdle, institutional support the most complex to
navigate, and actual budgetary room possibly the simplest hurdle to
overcome.

First and foremost, when it comes to something new and different, it
takes real leadership to make things happen. In the case of Carnegie
Mellon, President Jared Cohen personally took on the case last year,
resulting in the University being the first to make a renewable energy
commitment and setting the standard for 5 percent of  total consumption
from renewables. And just last week the University expanded its purchase
commitment to 6 percent of its electricity consumption for five years.

David Dzombak, professor of civil and environmental engineering and
chair of Carnegie Mellon’s Green Practices Committee, puts it this way,
“We are very pleased that our commitment to renewable energy and to the
development of wind power resources has sparked the involvement of so
many fellow institutions of higher education in Pennsylvania. An
important benefit for all of us has been the widespread interest this
has generated on our campuses, and the increased awareness of students
about the linkage of energy and the environment.”

Clearly, other institutions have strong leadership willing to take on
the task, which becomes easier as more schools jump on the bandwagon. At
most institutions, notably Swarthmore and Penn State, active student
groups and faculty also worked to encourage the purchase of renewable
energy.


MAKING THE CASE
As in any other budgetary decision, proponents must make the case that
the purchase is worthwhile and there is money to fund it. The nature of
institutions of higher learning may make it easier to make the case —
after all, these are the same universities that research and teach about
global warming, public health and the rural economy. However, making the
case also means overcoming the assumption that renewable energy is too
expensive and that a perpetually cost-conscious institution simply can’t
afford it. Overcoming this assumption is almost certainly a bigger
hurdle than actually finding room in the budget to pay for the purchase.


But the extra cost of renewable electricity is minimal compared to the
total energy costs of a university, its marketing budget, or its
tuition. For example, a university that purchases 20 million kWh of
conventional electricity annually might pay 5 cents/kWh, spending about
$1 million for electricity. Starting small, buying 5 percent of its
electric (1 million
kWh) from new renewable resources, as several colleges in fact did,
costs about $15,000-$25,000. Paying $15,000 more increases the
electricity budget only about 1˝ percent — about the same as tuition for
a single student at a state school, or half of a single tuition at a
private school.

Of course, a bigger purchase is serious business in the cost-conscious
world of higher education, even if still only a small part of the total
budget. For example, purchasing 20 million kWh to serve 100 percent of
the school’s load in the example above or about 5 percent of the load
for a major university like Penn, would cost about $300,000 more.


THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - A CASE STUDY
Penn made the case for its purchase with a fairly simple but
extraordinarily well-coordinated and effective effort to identify ways
to manage energy consumption more efficiently, and by successfully
engaging the university community to help achieve real energy savings.

Before it ever even thought about purchasing renewable electricity, Penn
was already facing skyrocketing energy prices and an organizational
commitment to implement a major energy cost saving program. Early in
2001 Penn’s facilities operations and finance departments brainstormed
different ways to reduce energy consumption and cost and developed a
master plan. The plan emphasized demand-side response management, and
simple behavioral changes to reduce unnecessary electricity use:

*Turning off unnecessary lights, elevators, other equipment, or even
whole buildings when not is use.

*Raising building baseline temperature to 78 and cycling air
conditioning, while identifying and classifying the specific usage and
needs of individual facilities to avoid interference with necessary
operations.

*Meeting to discuss weather and load expectations during the summer,
active monitoring of load and energy prices, and making operational
decisions based upon the adopted plan.

After a few months, they obtained the support of the provost and
president and implemented the plan. The sole major investment in
efficiency was the installation of new, more efficient water chillers.
The chillers also enabled a load-shifting program, using a thermal
storage system to make ice at night when electric prices were low and
using the melting ice as cold water during the day instead of using
electricity to refrigerate water to a constant temperature 24 hours a
day.

Penn managed to save $3.8 million on its electric bill, a reduction of
13 percent. Using 3.7 percent less electricity and shaving peak load by
about 18 percent, Penn saved about $3.5 million more in electricity
costs than the incremental cost of what is the single largest purchase
of wind energy ever in the United States. These savings more than paid
for the subsequent October 2001 purchase of 20 million kWh of renewable
energy.

While the tactics were fairly simple, implementation required a great
deal of communication and support from the university community,
something that’s not easy to achieve.


KEYS TO SUCCESS
Getting real cooperation from those who manage and use the university
facilities is key to the success of switching to renewable energy. Each
of Penn’s administrators, responsible for their individual school’s
energy costs, were brought onboard. Building managers were trained and
responsible to get the message to end users about the environmental and
other benefits. The university also conducted an advance test to monitor
both the effectiveness of communications and the resulting savings. For
one 30-minute period, facilities were instructed to turn off unnecessary
lights, reducing demand by 1.4 MW.

Penn’s goal of changing university operations during peak loads required
a major institutional commitment. For example, the university actually
shut down for two afternoons last summer. To get approval for this, the
facilities managers meet in the morning and monitor usage and prices.
They then make a recommendation to the provost, the vice president, and
then the president if shut down is warranted. The university also
implemented other partial shutdowns of buildings or certain operations
during peak load.


EVERYONE SHOULD BE DOING IT
Community Energy, Inc., and the colleges and universities have made it a
standard that institutions of higher education not only should but
readily can afford to buy renewable electricity. If they can, any
institution, major corporation, small business can do so as well. It’s a
lot easier and less expensive than going out and planting 65 million
trees!

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E-Cubed is available for reprint in newspapers and other publications.
Authors are available for print or broadcast.

PennFuture (http://www.pennfuture.org), with offices in Harrisburg,
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, is a statewide public interest membership
organization, which advances policies to protect and improve the state's
environment and economy. PennFuture's activities include litigating
cases before regulatory bodies and in local, state and federal courts,
advocating and advancing legislative action on a state and federal
level, public education and assisting citizens in public advocacy.

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____________________________________________________________________________
This discussion group is sponsored in part by: 
  * Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology, http://www.crest.org
  * Global Environmental Options, http://www.geonetwork.org
Archives and related documents can be found at at: http://www.green-power.com