Glumac’s Building Sciences Group is actively working on campus-scale decarbonization framework projects for California State University, University of Colorado, Boulder, George Mason University, and others. With this depth of experience, and the watershed moment of 2030 fast approaching, we caught up with our Senior Sustainability Strategist, Ante Vulin, to discuss the value-add of these projects for building portfolio owners, and what success looks like for a decarbonization project.
Operationally, what does success look like in this space?
For a university that wants to feel like it’s making progress on decarbonization, you should feel confident that your buildings are operating efficiently, meaning you know how much energy they’re using, and you have the know-how on your staff to be able to identify and rectify problems as they pop up.
It means that as you’re developing new capital projects or new renovations or any project where you’re touching your physical plant, you have an idea of where you need to be in terms of performance of those systems, of the types of technology you’re going to deploy and how you’re going to future-proof that equipment.
So, it’s not just the state we’re going to work in today, but it’s going to work in the future in a changing climate or in a changing code environment.
University campuses run the gamut of building types: residential, labs, data centers, entertainment venues, etc. So how do you meet the challenge of balancing all of these major usage variables in a single plan?
It’s definitely a challenge to balance a lot of different building types and especially on a university campus where you have different schedules, different research needs, different end user groups who have different needs or be more or less vocal about wanting changes done to their facilities.
We like to use data to help simplify the process to identify what are your biggest emitters or where are your biggest opportunities for operating cost reduction. That lets us focus our attention there first before we tackle everything else.
The phrase sometimes is “Eating the elephant one piece at a time.” And in this case, we know the pieces that make sense to eat first or the things that are going to save you the most money in the long term. Then once we focus on those metrics that are really data-driven, we can also talk about the qualitative metrics.
What are the academic or research or pedagogical needs where you want a building that embodies what you are striving to at your university and then set the last point is how do you resonate with what people care about? We hear from when we do surveys on university campuses that food is really important. And as engineers, we may not be the experts on food, but we know how to tie that into your carbon story and your sustainability story and find those opportunities even if your other major capital project budget is all tied up.
How would we help tell that story for a university? People see Glumac as an engineering firm. So if we’re talking about carbon impact of the food we have on campus, our clients might ask: What does that have to do with the HVAC system?
Well, our real strength at Glumac is we can talk to you in a quantitative and qualitative way about the relative impacts of these different metrics, whether it’s staff or student commuting versus your buildings versus all the things you buy, versus the impact of the certain community your institution happens to be located in. And by bringing numbers into this conversation, I think it helps prevent that analysis paralysis where you don’t know where to start, where you know certain things are important, but you may not have much control over them.
Or you sometimes feel you have competing opportunities where, say, you’re an institution that is focused on serving a diverse community that often includes a heavy amount of commuter students, you don’t want to get rid of that opportunity where people are living at home or in lower cost situations and force them to live in brand new campus housing. That kind of conflicts with your mission.
Learn about our decarbonization study at the University of Colorado, Boulder
What a decarbonization plan can do is lay out for multiple stakeholders how this whole path as we draw emissions down to 0, what’s the right order? And it’s not saying we’re not going to take any action on commuting right now, but it’s more about documenting the actions that the university could take. So, for example, how is the university interacting with the local or regional transit agencies? What are the opportunities there, perhaps more in an advocacy role, And that starts to move the needle on the commuting side. While in the same time, the things that the university does control, like its physical plant or its capital planning project are also making deep gains on the emissions that are directly under its control. That’s the win/win that we try to find.
What is the primary challenge to success?
I think the challenge, at a high-level, is limited resources and those resources include money, time, staff capacity or expertise. And that that balance will be slightly different for every institution.
What we try to bring is that quantitative method of understanding, OK, within these constraints, what are my lowest cost or fastest or easiest solutions that still lead to big emissions reductions.
The slight upside of where we are right now in that climate reduction path is there are still a lot of low hanging fruit. We’ve seen many universities roll out LED retrofits as one kind of low hanging fruit that they’ve solved. So after that, let’s dig a little deeper. Smart heat pump deployment, deploying electric vehicles and fleet electrification in a smart way as well as data-driven monitoring of existing buildings. How do we actually ensure what we have is operating as efficiently as possible? I think those are those key steps that we can all take right now. They’re going to huge gains and set us up for more success with those harder to, to realize gains down the road.
2030 has long been shorthand for a necessary point where sea change regarding climate is necessary. What do you want to see happening in a built environment then?
2030 is really the milepost on the way to 2050 where science tells us we need to draw down operating carbon emissions to zero. By 2030, what we need to see happen for all our buildings is that the new buildings should be at a net zero level of performance. And that means they should be very efficient. They should be using heat pumps, they should be running on electricity.
And that needs to be paired with a renewable energy strategy. So that means whether it’s on site building integrated renewables or having an off-site renewable strategy that’s harnessing say the larger purchasing power of a university, we need to be all our new buildings to be operating that level where they are not adding operational carbon emissions to a university’s footprint.
For existing buildings by 2030, we need to know everything that we have in our buildings that’s polluting and know when it needs to be replaced so we can make that smart, most cost effective end of life transition to all electric equipment.
And then we just need the data. For most universities, addressing those items gets you through a huge percentage of your missions. If you can do that, you’re in great shape. And then we need to have the data that starts guiding us towards those harder to control things like car and electric vehicle transition, purchasing those factors that are less directly in your control. But you’re going to need to start making some investments to help get you to that path.