Status Report

We're feeling very successful lately here at Williams, although we're definitely still playing catch-up with Middlebury. This Monday the Climate Action Committee presented a complete plan to the senior staff outlining how to bring Williams down to 10% below 1991 levels by 2020. Its not the ambitious goal I was hoping for, but at the same time it is a commitment of millions of dollars and institutional focus for an important and achievable goal.

We're also in the process of changing out every incandescent light on campus, a few dorms a night and today there was a large ice sculpture in front of the science library which spelled out the word E-A-R-T-H which melted slowly for all to see.

My personal work has mostly been (and will continue to be) on focus the nation and energizing a large group of climate action heroes and concerned students. For instance we have a winter study course this year dedicated to organizing that event.

It seems Middlebury is committed to becoming carbon neutral and I think that's a phenomenal goal. I know the Williams senior staff is taking a trip up there this weekend to see how it works.

What I would really like to see is something really worth doing that could be coordinated between a few schools in a way that got more than just the environmentalists involved. Maybe something revolving around a sports match or something.

But all in all its been a good week and its really nice to see hard work pay off. Now if only the Record would publish my op-ed.

Williams College Should be Carbon Neutral

I was doing some reading this week, browsing around between the NYtimes and the DrudgeReport, looking for something suitable for a few minutes of healthy procrastination, when I happened to find the Stern report. And no, before you ask, I'm not talking about Howard Stern. I'd heard the report talked about a few times by people here and in some blogs, so I figured it would be worth a closer look.

A year ago the British government, after hearing a sub-par climate report full of fluffy data, commissioned Nicholas Stern to give them the real, scientific and economic deal. According Her Majesty's Treasury website, Sir Nicholas Stern is the Head of the Government Economics Service and was delighted to present his report to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Economics of Climate Change. Now that sounded like a rather impressive resume, and surely not the idealistic environmentalist type, more like a hard headed economist, so maybe he was going to talk about the other side of climate change, the one we don't see in this liberal bubble of New England.

What does the former chief economist from the world bank advise the world to do? Cut emissions of climate changing gases by 80% by the year 2050. Globally. Not 10% below 1990 levels,which is a 'reasonable' number thrown around by liberal leaning administrations. 80% is a huge number and it might as well be 100% because we know that whatever plan we make, some things will go wrong, and as a citizen, I'd like to err on the side of caution for once.

These are the two most important things I have to say. The cost of doing nothing will be far, far higher than the cost of acting now. And, this task is not hopeless.

Williams college is not the world, although we try and be rather worldly in our aspirations. But we are a community of 3400 (total students, faculty and staff) living, breathing and lucky citizens who care very much.

We might not get involved in every issue we are aware of or not invest ourselves in justice when there's too much homework, but I believe we do care very much. We don't just care about the big picture, we care about buildings designed with as much efficiency as flashiness. We care about the status of Williams college and our coveted number one status, but not just because we do things by the book. We pride ourselves in being number one because we are the ones innovative enough to be a leader in academics, in sports, in dining and in arts. If we are given the chance to succeed and the will to commit, just as in our other fields of success, we will soon come to be leading innovators in environmental sustainability.

Why should Williams commit to being carbon neutral? Why should we invest more in the initial costs of buildings to achieve vastly lower operating costs in the future? Why should we commit ourselves even more to a local food supply? Why should we be installing solar and wind power, recovering heat from building ventilation and renovating our most energy inefficient buildings? Because we are a conservative financial institution.

We are conservative and we don't take risks with the big money. Part of not taking risks is looking at and planning for possibilities that other people might not think to look at. We need to get our geology professors into the board room to tell us what the price of oil will be in 50 years. Will it be $200 a barrel or more? Is that a possibility? Are we prepared for that, or are we going to be caught off guard just because we thought a finite resource was infinite?

Williams needs to use less energy. Our administration knows this and the ball is rolling. Its still rolling pretty slowly, but then again administrators are busy people who do an amazing job of keeping it all together. And because of that, they need congratulations and encouragement. Congratulations on being good listeners and encouragement to do things better. I wouldn't use the cliche, except the long mailing list of alumni, which we'll all be on soon enough and who pay for most of college, hear this all the time. I'm going to throw it right back at the people who make decisions, whether it be in student groups or Hopkins hall. Aim for the stars.

Panel on Green Architecture - (Notes)

Green building Panel discussion 11/11/2006. I know this is long, but a lot of it is just good ideas and data. For the most inspiring remarks, please skip to the end.

Introduction by Stephen Klass who did a reading from Morty's earth day letter to the campus who asks, What does it mean to become with a leader in sustainability?

The panel consists of Bruce Harley who works with mostly private homes with retrofits and new construction. He also trains builders and tradespeople, does design consulting and wrote Insulate and Weatherize which was selected by US green building council. Todd Holland is a sustainability coordinator for Smith, Holyoke and Amherst colleges. Joan Kelsh '85, coordinates green buildings for Arlington, VA. She encourage private businesses in Greater DC area to build green office buildings not because they have to but because its a huge benefit. She holds degrees from Williams in geology and environmental science and a masters from Yale forestry/envi studies. Marc Rosenbaum works on integrated systems design approach – finding the best solution for each project and client. He holds a BS and MS from MIT in engineering.

Harley (who was sporting a sweet MULLET)
Harley has a background in electrical engineering but he wanted to get into some more interesting stuff so he got into energy efficiency through working on mostly smaller, residential buildings. His company, Conservation Services Group (CSG), designs, develops and delivers energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Most clients are gas and electricity suppliers as well as government policy makers and private homes. He installs solar, sells renewable energy credits, educates builders and contractors. He also worked on making the ENERGY STAR home building guidelines. Most important point? Look at building as a system not as individual parts.

Efficiency and durability before are more important than renewables. This is doubly effective because we can save money in the long run and save money when it comes to buying more expensive renewables. For this, early planning is key. Also essential is health and safety, in other words, the buildings must enhance livability. But thats easy because when principles of durability and efficiency you make big strides towards a healthy building. Another aspect is building with Integrated Design. It is hard to get people to know what to do because there are so many ways to build buildings 'green' yet poorly. “Green” equipment or features do not equal performance. On the ground verification is essential because the label often promises more than is delivered. Energy code inspections are federal programs in 9 states that test the major aspects of a buildings efficient design. Fault Tolderatne details: we shouldn't expect herculean effort from builders and tradespeople. Painting a building green doesn't make it a green building!

Todd is the energy manager for the five colleges. His main points are Energy efficiency and conservation (conservation is tentative because its hard to sell to people), Green and Clean and Energy efficiency is a fifth fuel. The greenest energy is energy not used. Some statistics on computers: according to the Williams website, the average desktop uses 96 watts when idle and 1.8 watts when off while a laptop uses 28 watts idle and .07 watts off. EPA and LNBL say average PC idle 58% during day but only 36% of users power down at night. For more information see www.treehugger.com for a movie on electrical vampires.

Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges organized largest voter turnout in college history to vote to power 90% of student power from green sources. That was turned down by the college, but the they did do the three college challenge which pitted the colleges against each other, sort of a Do It In the Dark for colleges. It was led by student groups and saved 961,000 kwh. In conjunction with this the colleges bought 1,000,000 kwh. But the conservation drive was more efficient than the green energy drive! Some problems in buying green energy is people don't understand how you buy it. See http://www.green-e.org/what_is/dictionary/trc.html for more info on that.
Another project was to evaluate the 200 cold drink vending machines in 3 colleges (why so many? UVM has only 82!). those use $75,000 in electricity to run, which equaled exactly the amount of money made from sales. They removed some machines (24) which didn't make any money and installed 144 Vending Misers which save $15,000 per year. Its important because conventional large, de-centralized power statoins waste 70% of their energy as heat. It can be more efficient to generate heat and power all in one place (co-gen) even if just the heat or just the electricity is less effective.
Sources of electricity in new england: 48% natural gas, 10% nuke, 23% coal, 15% petroleum, 10% other. There is a brand new building in Holyoke (3 years old, LEED certified) which has no recovery of heat on lab building which circulates all the air every 10 minutes. They are installing heat recovery for intake/outtake and will save $46,000, 400 tons of CO2.
Problems with LEED are that commissioning is not enough, changes have to be checked. Also, LEED allows “point shopping” to avoid energy saving points.
New Paradigm means financial plus environmental stewardship = energy conservation. Sustainability paradigm: financial plus environmental stewardship plus social responsibility.

Joan (jkelsch@arlingtonva.us) works with people who are forced to do LEED and tries to help them use it as a good thing. What is Green? It means site planning for sustainability, safeguarding water and water efficiency, energy efficiency and renewable energy, conservation of materials and resources, indoor environmental quality because we spend most of our lives indoors, we need to build things that are good for us.

Environmental impact of buildings is 65% of total US consumption. Furthermore, buildings have a big impact on resources like the grid and sewer. Daylit buildings are better for people students have been shown to do better on tests, worker productivity is higher, patients in hospitals recover faster, etc. People like daylight.

LEED means Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The Green Building Council is a national group. You pay $750 membership, project registration $450, certification based on size - $0.35/sq ft. This gets you a certification. Arlington has a requirement for certain level of Green certification: Joan tries to convince them to do this for the right reasons, even though they have to.

Marc Rosembaum spoke again, without prepared remarks but just what was on his mind. Here's the rough paraphrase.

What is the task in front of us? We aren't doing enough. We aren't doing what we need to do at the rate we need to do it. We are fighting the battle against global warming and we are losing. Heroically, but we are losing. Some people say we don't like to think about it too much because its depressing. But the truth lies in seeing things as they are, and this is very very hard. Because it is so hard, our whole culture is based on ways of avoiding the truth. But maybe beneath the surface all of us know that things are deeply off-kilter, and we know it. There are massive changes in store and they are not techinical. The hurdles are in values.

www.passivhous.de is the standard, the ideal. They build houses that use 80% of normal homes in Germany (this means even bigger savings here) Building a passivhous in Germany costs 10% more. In America if we ask a builder to add 1% to the capital costs of a project they have a heart failure. This is the value shift. Its not a technical problem.

Build the things that we don't need because there are impressive and we have been told that we should want them. The colleges in this country are the worst because they are in an arms race. It is an arms race to attract students. “How do you build to love all the children of all species for all time” Bill McDonough. Another hero of his is Joanna Macey who works on feedback systems which are large and complex. How do we grapple with problems on the largest scales? “Act your age” - we are made up of the stuff of stars and we are as old as the universe.

Some great points I thought I'd share:
Alumni hear about DO IT IN THE DARK etc from newsletter with socially responsible investment fund
One great idea was to put Energyguide poster in every building to show how the building compares to campus, what the numbers are to help make it more real.

How to Make a Green Building

These are the notes I took at the talk tonight by Marc Rosembaum, P.E. - Energysmiths – Meriden, NH. I think this makes the most sense as a sort of checklist to be asking administrators and architects as the college plans new building or renovation projects.

Why do we bother making environmentally friendly buildings?
1) Climate Change and 2) Future energy supply
We can begin by asking what the effects of our actions are on other people and the world. Its easy to forget how much we depend on the reliable natural cycles for our lives. We are really good at displacing the effects of our actions and industry is particularly good at it. For more on this theme check out www.minorheresies.com

We begin by mentioning Mathew Simmons. A lifelong republican and not a treehugger, he is an investment banker who began reading the Society of Oil Engineers publications to figure out what was going on. He found that five Saudi fields produce 90% of their supply, these are running out and require lots of new technology to continue to draw on their depleting fields. Furthermore, they have a strong incentive to say there is more oil than there actually is. Based on this, he predicts oil will be $200 a barrel by 2010 and he's so sure that he made a $5000 bet on it

Buildings are a third of our CO2 emissions in the US and residential homes almost half of that, and that figure is higher than most countries, even higher if we take transportation of people and goods to residential buildings

Reducing Commerical Energy Use – What can we do when we build buildings to make them very efficient and easy to maintain?
Envelope – super-insulate and make it airtight (and test it)- foam not thick enough and usually put in by masons who don't have as high standards. Commercial/institutional buildings leak more than residential buildings because the design is different for every one.
Daylighting – design buildings that don't need lights in the daytime
Lighting – make it efficient – don't put it where we don't need it
Cooling – load avoidance – shade glass, reduce internal gains like heat emitting appliances such as fridges.
Ventilation – enthalpy recovery ventilation – recover heat and moisture from waste air (summer and winter). Building code for ventilation in renovations has changed up and down since '70s energy crisis and it is a political issue, not a scientific one. We shouldn't look at the code to determine how much to ventilate (at least not any more than we have to, but instead look at long-term costs)
demand control – sense how many people are there to determine ventilation.
occupancy controlled – make a switch like the lights to turn on the ventilation.
ventilation wheeling – make the ventilation vary over the course of the day based on expected occupancy.
Mechanical distribution – hydronic (circulate water to control temperature instead of circulating and heating air) get the air into the building with the least impact. Reduction in building mechanical system pays for envelope (insulation) upgrades
Economizer buildings – operable windows, night flushing (open building at night to cool it down)
Identify key loads not common in normal buildings – exhaust hoods, dishwashers, refrigeration, etc and recover heat from unusual appliances light dishwashers.

Dartmouth case study – What have we learned from the projects Marc has taken on there?
The question is how much equipment we need in the building: we want about 20 cubic feet of air per person per minute and we find installed capacity at 80-100. This is overkill, but how do we avoid it?
We can recover heat from shower water. Students there use 50 gallons of water per day per student so lets re-use that heat from waste water.
Valence Convectors separate ventilation from heating/cooling. We shouldn't ask the ventilated air to do the work of the heating. These convectors should be separate because if we turn the thermostat up it increases ventilation, but we don't want more ventilation, just more heat/cool, so separate the two
Use radiant heating which has a low gain so it can't fluctuate much and be prone to human over-adjustment and it works very well the low yield profiles of geothermal heat pumps.
Membrane seal the roof – wrap the membrane around eaves and into walls. Then overlap the three layers of insulation and then test the airtightness. You can use a fog machine to test the seal so that its very obvious what you did or didn't do. This holds the builders obviously accountable to following the plans.

Renovations – Fixing what we already own
New, large, complex buildings are a very small percentage of national building stock so we need to figure out how to fix the stuff that we have. Easy things to change include insulation that can be added; replacing windows with more efficient ones; install GSHP (ground source heat pumps) which are not so complicated that they can't be added to a completed building. Inside mechanical renovations include ceiling mounted valence convectors which are pipes along edge of ceiling which can circulate hot or cold water. This creates a convection current for both hot or cold air. The system was tested in Dartmouth in dorms and the students haven't had any complaints

Lessons Learned
Show up - if you want things to go as you specify you need to show up and look. There has been a serious decrease in the skill of the workers because the trades are more complicated and the education culture among workers is weaker than it used to be. They have a harder job than they used to and less support for doing it.
Commission everything. A separate authority can make sure that the things that the builders say they have done were actually done. Some things are very easy to check
Match system complexity to owners ability to manage. Not every group of management can handle the complexity that top-notch buildings need. Smaller institutions don't have the staff time or staff expertise
The education happens at the client level. When you teach an institution what it wants in a building, they will learn to value that and stand up for themselves in the future. That is the most important aspect. From that point, you need to establish a system of engineers and firms who can share the risk of new designs and systems.

Cooperation between architects and engineers!
Look at building in a whole! Don't compartmentalize these individual issues!


Good projects don't happen by accident – it takes really good people to make it happen! The richest institutions in the world will talk about this and talk about this and talk about it, but where is the action? Why do these institutions reject offers to make hugely effective, money-saving changes? The decision making process is coming from the top down in determining what the priorities are! One person can make a huge change, but they make a change by finding the right people to do the job right. There's nothing in our way except the will of people do do things!

Semi-Open letter to Morty Schapiro

Hi. Thanks for the link. Out of town on Friday.

At 07:17 PM 11/5/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi Morty,
>I'm sure that you've already heard a lot about the Stern report, but I
>couldn't
>help sending you the link, just in case. Since you are someone who tends to
>make decisions based on hard evidence and planning, I thought this new
>critique
>of present efforts to curb climate change by such a renowned economist
>might be
>interesting.
>
>Stern Report
>
>As always, my concern is what Williams can do in the purple valley. I'm very
>curious to see what the final report of the Climate Action Comittee is,
>although I fear it won't contain the commitment or daring goals we're hoping
>for.
>
>Most directly, since heating (and cooling) our buildings is our largest source
>of emissions, I'm distressed to see four current or recently completed
>projects ('62 center, Paresky, Daycare and Stetson-Sawyer) all lacking much of the
>energy saving technology that could have been used. Because of this, I was
>wondering if you would be able to make it to the talk this Friday night on
>building green.
>
>Thank you for your time, as always,
>-morgan-