Universities Must Assume The Responsibility To Decarbonize Faster Than Other Sectors

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As leaders in promoting sustainable development, academic institutions are increasingly interested in practices to reduce their carbon footprint in addition to training professionals for this worldwide need. Efforts to decarbonize on campuses are becoming more popular. Since students are powerful agents of change in their communities, universities play an important role in promoting sustainability and are increasingly striving to be an example of how to decarbonize.

Strategic interventions to reduce carbon emissions can emerge through improving the built environment or investing in renewable energy. University campuses are complex urban districts that involve collections of buildings — classrooms, laboratories, offices, cafeterias, and residences — and utility systems — transportation operations and production of heating, cooling, and power utilities,power plants, transportation circuits, water systems, and health services.

Together this infrastructure has many sources of carbon emissions. As a result, universities need to identify activities that have emission sources and which contribute to a carbon footprint as first steps to begin to decarbonize. Universities can showcase how their daily operations contribute to societal sustainability transition.

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The major contributor to carbon emissions without a doubt is the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy. Institutions of all kinds need to shift towards alternative and clean sources of power. From a national policies perspective, three pillars of deep decarbonization have been defined:

1. energy efficiency and conservation, including structural and behavioral changes;
2. decarbonization of energy carriers — electricity, heat, liquids, and gases; and,
3. end-use switching to these low-carbon carriers.

These three pillars are also relevant within the university context, especially those oriented towards energy efficiency and decarbonization of energy carriers. Following the approaches of ecological footprint analysis and carbon footprint analysis, a number of higher education institutions have been measuring their respective footprints.

• An ecological footprint adds up all the biologically productive areas for which a population, a person, or a product competes. If a population’s ecological footprint exceeds the region’s biocapacity, that region runs a biocapacity deficit. If a region’s biocapacity exceeds its ecological footprint, it has a biocapacity reserve.
• To receive stewardship recognition for carbon footprint analysis, an institution must determine a GHG emission value and be able to present inspectors with documentation that details the data and method used to calculate this value. A suitable carbon footprint analysis is all-encompassing and includes direct and indirect emissions. The analysis should determine the exclusive global amount of carbon dioxide and other GHGs accumulated over the full lifecycle of a product, service, or operation.

Three types of emissions are calculated during these analyses.

• ISO scope 1: direct emissions of the higher education institutions, such as heating of buildings;
• ISO scope 2: indirect emissions resulting from energy use; and,
• ISO scope 3: other indirect emissions, such as resulting from commuting or procurement.

Almost all universities that report CO2 emissions follow a scheme given by the “GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard.” Although allocating impacts due to this scheme by types of scopes is simple, many universities partially deviate from the scheme and apply individual allocations. The most relevant impact of energy consumption generally belongs to scope 2; however, large universities are establishing their power plants and, as a result, are shifting the impacts from energy production to scope 1.

More can be done, though. Higher education institutions have the capacity to improve carbon footprint estimates, particularly those associated with scope 3 emissions. They can standardize models to account for, measure, monitor, and report fossil fuel emissions in collaboration with other stakeholders and become leaders in the effort to decarbonize public and private sectors.

Progress to decarbonize higher education institutions is evident, as many campuses are setting up a team with carbon management responsibilities and have carbon management policy statements. Moreover, results are occurring in various segments, such as through reducing energy consumption, renewable energy projects, carbon offsets, improving energy efficiency, power purchase agreements, and open-market renewable energy certificates. Carbon footprint reduction practices are taking place with improvements in lighting, temperature control, better ventilation, and indoor air quality as well as the practices that contribute for healthy and sustainable environments. Even modes of distance learning can contribute to envisioning low carbon futures.

Geoexchange: A University Option to Decarbonize

In addressing environmental and sustainability objectives, campus energy systems frequently adopt ambitious goals and incorporate renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, into systemic change.

An editorialist for Higher Edargues that, if universities want to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, campuses across the US “must move away from fossil fuels and toward renewables five times faster.”  Such exponential change to decarbonize, the Higher Ed writer continues, would require accelerated investments in technologies such as geoexchange.

Let’s take a look at geoexchange. Universities typically have lots of open spaces which could be used as sites to drill the bore fields (850-foot-deep wells) to enable heat exchange. Swarthmore College in PA (“To Zero by Thirty Five”) is an example. Its website outlines how it will replace its high-pressure steam system with a geoexchange system to provide heat to campus buildings. Originally built in 1911, the ongoing steam system relies on the combustion of fossil fuels, mostly natural gas, to function. In contrast, the geoexchange system is a highly efficient, zero-carbon energy system.

This heat will be stored through the use of geoexchange wells, which are essentially deep vertical holes that contain a closed loop pipe system. As liquid travels through the pipes, it is either depositing thermal energy into the earth (summer) or extracting thermal energy from the earth (winter). With the help of the central geoexchange plant, this heated or cooled liquid is then sent to individual buildings across campus, where the HVAC systems transform that thermal energy into heating and cooling for our buildings.

Final Thoughts

A holistic approach that considers economic, environmental, and social dimensions is crucial for informed and responsible decision-making in energy system decarbonization. Higher education institutions must integrate techno-economic, environmental, and social perspectives into identification of and solutions to decarbonize.

Universities have always provided insights to leaders to ensure their decisions are effective and influential.  To decarbonize the energy system by the year 2050, it is crucial that innovations are trialed in a real world setting for the purpose of increasing public adoption and support to decarbonize. Higher education institutions can serve as a living laboratory setting that provides the blueprint for the development and testing of low-carbon energy technologies on the journey to net zero.

In order to reach carbon neutrality, centralized measures are needed, also termed “critical energy infrastructure decisions.”