Ball State University Going Geothermal to Slash Their Carbon Footprint in Half

Ball State University's Board of Trustees voted Friday to cut their campus carbon footprint in half by investing in the largest university geothermal heating and cooling system in the country in lieu of a proposed upgrade of their coal-fired boiler plant.

Four coal-fired boilers will be taken off line in two phases saving $2 million and 85,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. In addition, the switch will place BSU on the positive side of the proposed carbon cap and trade economy where they will be able to sell carbon credits and they will have greater immunity to volatile fossil fuel prices and new EPA regulations for coal-fired plant emissions, according to their news release.

To finance this bold plan, BSU plans to use $41.8 million already in hand that was previously approved for boiler replacement and apply it to the new geothermal proposal. The proposed system will be phased in and will be partially paid for with savings. It may also be poised for some of the federal stimulus package money as a "shovel ready" project. Speaking of shovels, to provide enough heat transfer capacity to heat and cool 40 buildings on campus, they will need 3,750 boreholes 400 feet deep. This is not a well system, but a closed-loop system that uses the earth as a heat sink and does not tap into water supplies like an open-well system. Borrowing heat from the earth and using it for cooling requires a fraction of the energy needed to generate heat and cooling using conventional methods.

Ball State University President Jo Ann M. Gora was a Charter Signatory to the American College & University President's Climate Commitment, which now includes 609 institutions representing over 30% of our nation's college student population. Under her visionary leadership, BSU has been a national leader in convening events for collaboration among colleges and universities to promote more sustainable campuses and curricula to deal with climate change. Robert Koester, AIA, LEED AP, Director of the BSU Center for Energy Research, Education, & Service and Chair of the BSU Committee on the Environment has been a pioneer in the campus sustainability movement and the driving force behind their important Greening of the Campus Conferences.

As an alumnus of Ball State University, I could not be happier with this strategic direction. It seems every time I pick up a publication that is describing the tsunami that is the campus sustainability movement, Ball State is named as an exemplary example. See the National Wildlife Federation's outstanding Campus Ecology publication, for example. One of the many benefits of this strategy is to attract the best and brightest students and faculty. A recent survey by the Princeton Review, which now issues Green Scores for campuses, noted that 63% of college candidates consider campus sustainability as an important part of their college decision process. In addition, this strategy represents a smart investment with a guaranteed return due to avoidance of rising utility and regulatory costs for fossil fuels. Finally, it transforms the University into a learning lab where theory becomes reality and the economic, social and environmental bottom line is all positive. I can easily imagine business classes where undergrads are learning about the advantages of clean renewable energy by looking at their university's own high-performance energy systems and comparing the costs and benefits verses conventional systems. Everybody wins, including Indiana taxpayers, and creative brain power triumphs over bureaucratic inertia.

Allow me to suggest a next step: create a for-profit consortium to build a large wind farm with the capacity to offset the campus electrical load, with reserves to provide for future growth and to provide a carbon neutral campus. Indiana has significant wind capacity, as already demonstrated in six counties and it is poised to be the 15th state in terms of total wind power capacity when all the wind projects in development are completed. The Cardinal Power consortium would be able to leverage the new tax incentives and carbon cap and trade credits for the next twenty years while it sells electricity to the University for an attractive 20-year fixed rate. After that period, the University owns the wind farm and essentially has no need to buy fuel, assuming they have converted their entire campus fleet to electric vehicles by then. Outrageous? Twenty colleges and universities have already invested in wind power and several others are utlizing large-scale solar electric systems. If BSU combines renewable energy with building energy efficiency upgrades, they could have excess power to sell to help pay for more interesting things, like reduced tuition and increased pay for employees.

What is outrageous in these rapidly changing times is business as usual. As longshoreman, philosopher, author and self-educated Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Eric Hoffer said, "In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists." Congratulations to Ball State University for leading America's colleges and universities to a more sustainable future.

Colleges Tackle Climate Change at AASHE 2008 in Raleigh, North Carolina

When I attended my first U.S. Green Building Council event in 1994, less than 200 people showed up. At the last Greenbuild International Conference in Chicago, more than a 100 times that number showed up to crowd McCormick Place. Next week, Greenbuild descends on Boston for what promises to be another record attendance that will probably approach 30,000.

Today, I am midway through another organization's conference that has some of the same feel of the exponential growth of the U.S. Green Building Council. The second conference of the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) more than doubled its attendance from their first conference to almost 2000 attendees from 48 states and 7 Canadian provinces representing over 400 colleges and universities.

One thing that made the Greenbuild conferences so popular was the quality and utility of the presentations in rooms packed full of very eager learners, who each had their own lessons to teach. AASHE has six parallel tracks going with the constant dilemma that there are several at any one time I want to hear. One after another, the heroic stories are told of faculty, staff and students across the country tackling the defining problems of this century. Together, they tell the story of a massive retooling of colleges and universities to equip students for a whole new world. Nearly 600 colleges and universities are signatories to the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which commits their institutions to achieving climate neutrality and to publishing their progress toward that goal. Many of the institutions here are not yet signatories, but they are learning a lot from those who are further along the path to campus sustainability.

In addition to the standard sessions and poster presentations, the keynote speakers have been outstanding. Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization led things off with reminders about the limits and daunting obstacles we face and the "race between tipping points in climate change and political change." Later he also described the hope embodied in a long list of success stories from around the world that illustrate how far we have come with wind and solar energy. He called the attendees to action and noted that "saving civilization is not a spectator sport."

This morning, Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix our Two Biggest Problems, outlined how our country had recently seen the "floor fall from under our feet with the economic collapse, but also how we had seen the ceiling begin to fly with the election of a new president." A gifted speaker, Jones outlined three actions needed to "focus the nation" to transform our economy to "take America back and take America forward." He called for 1) putting a price on carbon, 2) retrofitting our existing building stock and 3) repowering America with renewable energy and a new national power grid.

This evening's keynote speaker was Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline and the new book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. Senge called for a new way of educating with more variety and less factory-like regimentation to unlock creativity and innovation. He noted that the future will not likely look back on our age of "digging up stuff and burning it" with the mindset that finite resources are somehow infinite, but he also noted that "nobody is working hard to heat up the planet, they are just not aware of the consequences."

This theme of the need for ecological literacy and opportunity for change was common in all of the keynotes, which approached the theme in different ways, but with the same conclusion. There is no time to waste in transforming our interaction with the natural world which sustains us and the college campus is a good place to start that transformation.

College Campuses Going Climate Neutral

Raleigh's new LEED-Registered Convention Center will host AASHE 2008

When a relatively new national organization sells out its second annual conference, you have to think they may be on to something. Such is the case for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. AASHE 2008 has been sold out for a couple of weeks but I was lucky enough to get off the waiting list so I will be blogging from the conference starting this weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina, along with many of the other 2000 participants. Carbon offsets are being purchased to make the conference carbon neutral, including attendee travel.

Founded in 2006, AASHE is an association of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada formed, according to their web site, "to promote sustainability in all sectors of higher education - from governance and operations to curriculum and outreach - through education, communication, research and professional development. AASHE defines sustainability in an inclusive way, encompassing human and ecological health, social justice, secure livelihoods, and a better world for all generations."

The long list of member institutions probably contains your alma mater. Among those are over 588 whose presidents have signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Change Commitment, representing about 25% of all college students in America, with the goal of achieving climate neutral campuses. Is your college among the signatories?

Speaking climate change, The Pew Center on Climate Change has a number of excellent resources on the topic, including likely policy changes with a new administration and a new map that shows the climate initiatives in all states, by state and by initiative.