In January, the EPA's Green Power Partnership announced its "top ten" list of colleges and universities purchasing green power. Among them, listed at number six, is my alma mater, the University of California at Santa Cruz.
UC Santa Cruz uses, I'm proud to say, "100 percent" green energy. In 2006 the campus Physical Plant purchased 50 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy certificates for wind, solar, geothermal, small scale hydroelectric, biomass, and landfill gas from Sterling Planet, a nationwide retailer of renewable energy. As noted in the press release, "the purchase, on top of UC Santa Cruz's already existing electrical contract for 5 million kilowatt-hours of renewable power, means the campus is now considered 100 percent green -- offsetting all its projected electrical consumption for fiscal 2006-07."
Student Leadership for Green Energy
Tommaso Boggia, current senior whom at the time was CalPIRG intern and Student Environmental Center Green Building Campaign co-organizer, led a campus-wide campaign in Spring of 2006 to bring a clean energy ballot measure to the student elections. [Full disclosure: Tommaso Boggia is a friend of mine and I was a member of the environmental center. Boggia is a passionate and knowledgeable advocate for clean energy. He could be seen everywhere during the months before the election, raising awareness and student support.] "Ballot measure 28: Renewable Energy" asked if undergraduate students would increase their tuition by three dollars each quarter "to purchase renewable energy certificates in order to offset campus use of electricity." With a quarter of the student body voting on the measure, the permanent fee was passed by 69.7 percent of the vote.
The three dollar ballot measure collects student fees, which when added up, collectively are used to offset the cost of purchasing renewable energy credits by the campus. and with a full-time undergraduate enrollment of 13,941 students in Fall 2006, the ballot measure therefore generated 41,823 dollars in the first quarter, and 125,469 dollars over three quarters -- all for the purchase of clean energy in the current academic year. As Boggia explained to me, this is "about 3,000 dollars more than we need every quarter. This money will become part of a fund to offset future increases in Renewable Energy Credit costs. Our contract with Sterling only lasts for five years."
Prior to the clean energy ballot measure, the campus had been purchasing 87 percent of its energy from fossil fuel generating plants. UC Santa Cruz reportedly uses uses over 27 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.
The 2006 student elections success may also lead to a success for every public university in California. "The UC Santa Cruz purchasing department managed to have Sterling Planet extend their offer to all other University of California campuses and California State Universities, ensuring an affordable price for the whole system, and an economy of scale for them," said Boggia. Such an impact echoes the kind of inter-system communication and collaboration woven across the UC system and between students and staff. "We were able to make it so we can extend the great price that we got to all other UC and CSUs, and all they have to do is sign a contract."
Campus Energy Consumption
University and college bulk purchasing of renewable energy can make a significant difference. The EPA Green Power Partnership calculated that "the combined green power purchases of [the] Top 10 Partners [in higher education] equals nearly 649 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually, which is equivalent to the electricity needed to power more than 52,000 average American homes annually." (EPA GPP website, May 2007). Let us take the 52,000 average American homes as a rough but functional estimate to calculate an equivalent energy demand. [Aside: prior to April 2007, the EPA GPP website described the Top 10 as committing 634 million kilowatt-hours and the total equivalency as meeting approximately 51,000 American homes. As of April, the data set was changed to the current numbers reflected in my calculations.]
If the average American home size is about 2.54 people (according to US Census Bureau 2005 housing data, the average household size of an owner-occupied home is 2.7 people and the average household size of a renter-occupied home is 2.39; averaged together 2.54), then the 649 million kilowatt-hours committed to green power is the same amount of electricity used by an approximate 132,080 average Americans at home.
And with a little number-crunching, evidence of UC Santa Cruz's existing conservation efforts are also apparent. UC Santa Cruz's green power purchase of 50 million kilowatt-hours is 7.7 percent of the total, ten-campus purchase of 649 million kilowatt-hours. Add in the campus' existing purchase of 5 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy certificates, and the 55 million kilowatt-hours purchased by the campus is a little more than twice the 27 million kilowatt-hours of energy used a year. Using the EPA estimate of the Top Ten energy purchases as equating the needs of 52,000 average American homes, I calculated UC Santa Cruz's 50 million kilowatt-hour purchase as serving the same energy needs of 4,004 homes, which is the same as approximately 10,170.16 people. The 27 million kilowatt-hours actually consumed is then equivalent to the usage of 2,184 average American homes or 5,547.36 average Americans.
Looking at these final figures alone, the impact of energy conservation at UC Santa Cruz becomes evident. If 27 million kilowatt-hours of energy are required for a total population of 19,341 students, faculty, and staff in Fall 2006, then an equal amount of average Americans are therefore requiring the use of about 3.5 times more energy than the population of the UC Santa Cruz campus! And remember, a college campus is not a place with miniscule energy needs. From facilities and grounds with laboratories, theaters, lighting, emergency systems, offices, and a population running computers throughout the night, watching television at odd hours, leaving lights on, enjoying hot showers, hosting events, and managing dining facilities, college campuses breathe life and consume energy as if cities in themselves.
Collaboration and Conservation
The existing energy conservation efforts of UC Santa Cruz are also being strengthened by the UC Santa Cruz Green Campus Program. In Summer of 2006, Patrick Testoni, UC Santa Cruz Physical Plant Energy Manager, founded a chapter of the Alliance to Save Energy's Green Campus Program and hired three student interns -- Tommaso Boggia, Lauren Mills, and Rachel Shiozaki -- to educate the campus about energy and reduce energy usage. Collaboration between students and staff is very important. With Testoni, the Green Campus team has also been responsible for managing the energy savings created by the student ballot measure.
In their January "Energy Enthusiast" newsletter, the team of interns announced their initial conservation efforts after a single academic quarter. Holding six events and reaching 697 students, the interns distributed 420 Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs, created an annual water heating energy savings of 4,302 therms, saved 42, 137 kilowatt-hours of energy annually, avoided 101,960 pounds of CO2 emissions, and saved the school 13,225.53 dollars in annual utility costs.
Fascinated by how buildings use energy, Boggia has been conducting a lighting retrofit project covering on and off campus facilities. His most recent work includes auditing old, 4-foot long, 32 Watt T8 compact fluorescent tubes with the intent to replace them new 28 Watt versions. In the multi-story academic building of Social Sciences 1, Boggia identified an impressive 2,000 fluorescent tubes. The retrofit effort will create an 8 kilowatt-hour reduction in operational energy consumption by the building.
Fellow intern Lauren Mills has also been tackling the precise energy consumption of campus facilities. Mills has been mapping the campus' energy use with Geographic Information Systems, and has been examining how campus dining services can be altered to conserve energy. Her work on dining halls and kitchens will complement UC Santa Cruz's existing green dining halls featuring a rich array of local, organic produce. Mills recently assisted in the upgrading of the kitchens by installing low-flow, pre-rinse nozzles. The "Energy Enthusiast" also notes that Mills is planning to produce a "preferred purchasing guide" for dining hall managers to use when purchasing energy efficient technology.
Rachel Shiozaki, the newest member of the team, has been focusing her efforts on campus residential energy consumption. Close to half of all UC Santa Cruz' students live on campus in dorms and apartments or in off-campus university facilities. In the past UC Santa Cruz has held competitions between college communities (there are ten colleges) and residential dorms as motivation for energy conservation. I'm hopeful that Shiozaki's work will continue to evolve energy use habits and find creative ways to implement energy saving measures into the daily lives of students.
Collectively, the interns are in the process of developing an "environmentally preferred purchasing (EPP)" logo to be placed on products sold in campus stores.
The interns are also active outside the Green Campus Program. Lauren Mills has been a teaching assistant for an Electrical Engineering course on Renewable Energy. And Boggia and Shiozaki, along with fellow student organizers Eva Stevens and Tom Ivy, are instructing an accredited course about climate change and energy with the campus' Education for Sustainable Living Program. The vision, described Boggia: "we hope that through our involvement with these academic programs we can identify leaders to continue the energy efforts in the future years."
Boggia hopes that his work as a Green Campus Program intern will result in a reduction of energy use. "I do not know if our results will be significant enough to make a big difference, at least not in one year alone," he explained. "The Green Campus Program is going to be staying on campus for much more time, and hopefully within a couple of years we will se a significant reduction of energy use (or at least an increase in energy intensity)."
The UC Campus Sustainability Landscape
In recent years, a rich pattern of student sustainability organizing and administrative collaboration has been woven systemwide. In 2002, Greenpeace initiated a student-led campaign for a UC sustainability policy; this effort led to the formation of the California Student Sustainability Coalition (CSSC), an umbrella organization uniting the environmental organizations of every campus. The CSSC has held systemwide convergences, and leads a number of campaigns to bring sustainability policy measures to the entire system. The organization drafted language for a systemwide Green Building and Renewable Energy Policy and were key advocates and collaborators in the policy design process. After diligence, commitment, and working closely with the Office of the President, the hard work paid off. The policy was adopted by UC President Dynes in July 2003, and in July 2004 a policy on green building design and clean energy standards was issued.
The most recent step take by the UC system has been to join the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. A UC Office of the President press release described the commitment and existing UC sustainability policy:
"The commitment calls for UC to take clear, comprehensive steps to achieve climate neutrality as soon as possible. UC's recent policy on sustainable practices already exceeds the requirements laid out by the national group. UC currently sets greenhouse gas emission targets of returning to 2000 emission levels by 2014 and to 1990 levels by 2020. University policy also requires each UC campus to develop an action plan to meet these targets and a strategy to achieve climate neutrality as soon as possible after the interim targets are achieved."
And like Boggia's Renewable Energy Ballot Measure, students at UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley have also recently passed sustainability-themed ballot measures, theirs titled "The Green Initiative Fund" (or "TGIF" for short). Berkeley students passed the measure this April. Students approved a five dollar fee, per student per semester, to raise over 200,000 dollars annually for student, faculty, and staff projects focused on making the university campus environmentally sustainable above and beyond any "minimum sustainability requirements."
University and college campus' are key players in changing production, procurement, and consumption strategies. Campus green energy procurement could even have an impact on renewable energy similar to what has been happening to local food systems with modified campus food procurement strategies. For example, UC Santa Cruz's own Food Systems Working Group has brokered an ongoing relationship between the campus' dining program and the Monterey Bay Organic Farmers Consortium. The Working Group is bringing healthy, organic food to on-campus students, and in doing so has increased the market for local organic, seasonal produce.
And energy systems, like food systems, are vital elements of the interconnected campus landscape.
I'd like to see higher education experiment with mixing small and large scale energy strategies, from localized site-specific power generation to the sustainable use of grid-based energy sources. Energy responsibility could extend to other areas such as transportation and even play with energy generation in recreational systems and planning and design contexts. Such solutions might even evolve into a college campus version of the California Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program. The CCA allows cities and other regional districts to pool together their local energy generation prowess in order to make a significant contribution to the energy required for the entire local area. At the January meeting of the UC Committee on Grounds and Buildings, the Annual Report on Green Building, Clean Energy, and Sustainable Transportation Policy (pdf) reported that the Office of the President completed contract documents in October 2006 to allow each campus "to contract with outside parties to install, own, and operate solar photovoltaic systems on University property and then sell the system's electricity output to the campus at rates comparable to what the campus would otherwise pay for electricity." A solar project above a new parking structure at the UC San Francisco Mission Bay campus was cited as the first implemented example.
A campus is a distinctive environment for experimentation, discovery, and inspiration. Solutions for a sustainable future are being conceived and harvested by universities and colleges both in the classroom and in the campus landscapes themselves. Classroom learning experiences mixed with campus stewardship and an active understanding of and participation in the making of campus places -- including their infrastructural systems, history, planning and development, land-use and resource management, ecology, community structure, city politics, student government, and campus lore, arts, culture, and of course, curriculum -- can teach students about the connection between their local campus world and the global world, help them find responsibilities and passions, and observe how systemic change can happen meshed within the nurturing places one may call home. Boggia and fellow Green Campus Program interns demonstrate just how important student involvement and leadership in campus sustainability is; their work at UC Santa Cruz is enriching their own education, transforming the campus and its community, and building a "100 percent" green energy future.
Above photo includes: Green Campus Program interns Tommaso Boggia, Rachel Shiozaki, Lauren Mills, and UC Santa Cruz stakeholders Clint Jeffreys for Dining Services, SIlas Snyder for Housing, and Patrick Testoni for Facilities. Courtesy Tommaso Boggia.
