The Sustainable Endowments Institute's new green rankings are out, and there is some good news: With all the focus on sustainability in higher education over the past few years, grades are going up. Just over half of the schools surveyed earned an overall grade of B-, compared to only 38 percent in last year’s report. The average overall grade this year is a C+, but 26 schools received the top grade (A-), including Amherst, Harvard, Pomona, University of Washington and University of New Hampshire.

Like last year, the report comes on the heels of a variety of rating systems. Sierra and Greenopia have their own (less rigorous) versions ranking the Top 20 and the 100 largest, respectively, and AASHE has just launched its STARS tracking system for schools to join. Last year, we released the Campus Report Card, which showed improvement on the operations and facilities side of greening, but a lag in curriculum development.

SEI’s report, now in its fourth year, only covers 300 schools in its ratings, leaving out the other 3700 colleges and universities in the U.S, although 32 new schools petitioned to be added this year and are ranked accordingly. It's worth noting that these 300 schools are chosen not on the basis of extraordinary projects or the extent of their efforts—though many are pack leaders—but on the size of their endowments.

The Institute notes, “The profiled schools have combined holdings of more than $325 billion—approximately 95 percent of all higher education endowment assets. Widespread investment declines have impacted almost all schools, with the Report Card finding average endowment value dropping by 23 percent in the past year.”

Its focus on the endowment is the most useful feature of SEI’s research. That enormous pool of money allows the wealthiest schools to support new research and endeavors that might not otherwise get the funding they need. Harvard, for example, reports that it invests in renewable energy companies, and “allocates a portion of the endowment to private equity and natural resource investments that seed companies and/or ventures that may take environmental and sustainability factors into consideration.”

But highlighting only the wealthiest or the largest schools is fraught with its own issues. As the Chronicle and others have pointed out over the years, sustainability is an extremely difficult thing to track, and an even more difficult thing to grade, particularly when looking at an entire campus. For example, if the college is planning to erect a half dozen new buildings that will certainly increase the energy needs of the campus, even if they are built according to LEED standards, should the school's grade go up or down? 

And what about the small schools, lacking in deep pockets but with commitment to spare?

Mitchell Thomashow of Unity College notes the importance of university investment, writing that colleges serve as dynamic economic multipliers, becoming places “where businesses and faculty work with students and community members to develop innovative entrepreneurial approaches.” However, Unity, which received a B on SEI’s report, wasn’t graded on its endowment because it didn’t meet the minimum threshold of $16 million in assets. It also received a D in the transportation category because its 24-car fleet doesn’t include any hybrids, and because “most people walk to their destinations on campus due to Unity’s small size.” Does this mean that Unity's students and staff aren't invested in their community, or that they are emitting more carbon dioxide during their commutes? Quite the opposite. But SEI's system isn't designed to take these small-school factors into account.

The hope is that as sustainability enters the mainstream, expanded systems like STARS will more comprehensively rate these colleges in a way that takes into consideration factors beyond finance, as well as providing a more common standard for measurement. Without those two factors, measuring sustainability won't be possible.  

We talk a lot about climate and the environment here at Campus Ecology, but the truth is that long-term sustainability requires more than ecological considerations. If a school is carbon-neutral, but not financially viable, it has failed its mission. Therefore, energy efficiency and other “green” initiatives often have to save the institution money, or at least break even, to be considered at all.

The most common way to gain support for these energy projects is to prove a significant return on investment, and are therefore worthy of being included in the college's master plan. So, articles on campus greening initiatives usually include a summary like this one: an initial investment of $X is expected to pay for itself in Y years, and generate an extra $Z. The numbers often speak for themselves, as in the case of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, which saves 2.26 tons of CO2 emissions per vending machine per year using small devices that turn off the machines when idle. The Vending Misers, which cost $175, pay for themselves in one year by saving about $200 on electricity bills.

It seems like a no-brainer. One of our latest articles, Master Planning for Sustainability, quotes Terry Calhoun of the Society of College and University Planners, who says, "If you did good integrated planning, you would end up with sustainability. Why would you build a building that uses six times as much energy as it has to?"

Unfortunately, this picture is incomplete. The reality of a university’s bureaucracy can often mean that even projects with large and easy paybacks may be ignored, because complex budgeting structures are not designed to reward electricity savings in the facilities department. This may be true even if a comprehensive master plan puts environmental sustainability as an organizational priority. Leith Sharp, writing for Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, notes that, “Even if operating managers do manage to fund efficiency improvements to produce operational savings, they are rarely allowed to capture and reinvest these savings for further improvements. Instead, they will often see next year’s operating funds reduced to reflect this operating cost reduction, hardly a reward for a job well done.”

Sharp, former director of Harvard’s Green Campus Initiative, adds:

"Our institutions freely use the mantra of the “business case” to challenge and scrutinize the viability of anything new without addressing the fact that in many cases the business case is being sabotaged by poorly designed finance and accounting structures. Colleges and universities are incurring enormous additional costs by failing to reform these practices to enable good business practice to flourish … It is not clear how this has evolved, but it occurs in almost all large organizations. This division results in capital budget managers resisting the expenditure of any extra money, even when the operation savings are extraordinary. At the same time, the operating budget managers commonly do not have enough access to funds for ongoing efficiency improvements."

For a problem this complex, master planning is only part of the solution. Sharp goes on to describe the "complex, irrational, and unconscious life of the institution," which sabotages the work of campus sustainability officers and their efforts to bring the campus towards climate neutrality. As examples, she points out energy-purchasing contracts based on volume consumptions (where the unit price of energy goes up when consumption goes down) or steam return-metering. Both systems encourage individual waste, which saves money to a particular building or department, but results in overall system inefficiency.

Harvard was able to make significant progress using a revolving loan model, which funded projects with paybacks of less than five years, and reinvested that money in ongoing upgrades, efficiency projects, metering and behavioral change programs.

But Sharp is aware that this wouldn’t be possible everywhere: Harvard is blessed with more resources than most schools, and a sustainability staff of dozens of people. “The deeper lesson,” she says, “is that we should stop creating the ongoing need for revolving loan funds—by structurally connecting capital and operating budgets and institutionalizing life-cycle costing, a well-established methodology for calculating upfront and future operating costs relating to different decision-making options. I also believe that our organizations should capture and reinvest savings that result from successful resource conservation and waste-reduction efforts as routine practice to fund dedicated annual innovation budgets for financing pilot projects and ongoing efficiency upgrades.”

It’s not exactly a small request. Such redesigning of the university’s essential infrastructure might take years, and it’s a lot harder than installing add-ons to a couple vending machines, or even retrofitting an HVAC system. This doesn’t discourage Sharp. She says, “Over many years, I have observed that the common belief that people are innately adverse to change is not generally true. People are not resistant to change, they are opposed to instability, and they simply assume that change equals instability.”

To achieve this stability, Sharp argues that the sustainability staff need to act as the rudder-on-the-rudder, going beyond simple equations of return-on-investment and discussing the real risks and barriers in play. Only then, she says, can universities bring their carbon footprints “down to an equitable share of what the planet’s life-support systems can support.”

Former President Bill Clinton, at the third annual meeting of the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) in Chicago today, shared valuable perspectives on investing in large-scale building retrofits for efficiency and clean energy on campuses, including the possibility of significantly contributing to the creation of the new, green jobs needed to revive the U.S. economy.

Efficiency retrofits and clean energy on campus, he noted, will create significantly more new jobs than comparable spending on fossil fuels in coming years. A single campus, such as Cornell University, may invest up to a gross $150 million over the next 30 years to achieve its greenhouse gas reduction goals, according to Joseph Grasso, Cornell’s assistant dean for finance and administration. Using the U.S. government’s job creation estimate of $92,000 per job created, Cornell’s investment will not only achieve a net energy savings over time, especially when new regulations require internalizing the cost of carbon emissions, but could create more than 1,500 new jobs in the region.

If all 650 signatories to the ACUPCC agreement invested only 1/3 as much as Cornell, the ACUPCC signatories would collectively represent a $30 billion jobs creation powerhouse, while reducing net energy costs and pollution on campuses and in surrounding community.

How to finance such investments? A new guide to be released soon by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) will detail a range of financing strategies for energy efficiency retrofits and clean energy projects on campuses.

A new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. req.) profiles a minority trend that could, if economic conditions persist, become a majority problem.

Scott Carlson reports that "about 25 percent of the colleges that should have turned in their greenhouse-gas reports in September are still delinquent. Of the colleges that had a deadline in January, nearly half have yet to file."

The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which has more than 600 signatories, commits schools to working towards climate neutrality, and the first step in that process is creating a public greenhouse gas inventory. As Carlson points out, it is a difficult requirement, but an easier one than those following, which include creating an emissions reduction plan, carrying it out, and integrating sustainability education into the university's curriculum.

However, between budget shortfalls and shifting priorities, many schools have failed to create or publish their emissions report, and some, like the College of Alameda in California, seem to have forgotten entirely. Many of the delinquent schools are small institutions with fewer resources or shrinking enrollments, for whom large investments in sustainability were always a stretch:

"Mr. King says Cabrillo [College] may have to postpone plans for some renewable-energy projects, like solar panels, that require upfront investment. The college has plans for a new building that would be certified platinum in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, but budget concerns may require the college to shoot for a lower certification instead."

Many of the schools that have yet to create an inventory report that their philosophy remains unchanged, and that sustainability remains an important part of the agenda, even in difficult times. The article also notes that supporting organizations, such as Clean Air -- Cool Planet and AASHE, are continuing to reach out to schools that are lagging and provide resources.

But what of the other 75%, who have reported their emissions and are now (presumably) writing their climate action plans? The Chronicle notes in a different story that Butte College, a small, two-year institution in Northern California, has just added three new solar arrays to its existing panels from 2005. The beefed-up system will generate 2.7 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, and is expected to save the school $32.6 million on utility bills in the next 20 years.

Ball State university, long a leader in climate action (and frequent sustainability conference host), has just approved drilling almost four thousand closed-loop wells to heat and cool the campus. Ground-source heat pumps use constant ground temperature, which is cooler than the surface in summer and warmer in the winter, to save energy and cut carbon emissions. The university hopes to drill the first well after commencement this May.

What's most interesting is how the project will be funded:  The university already had $40 million from the state legislature to replace aging and inefficient boilers, but received no bids for the project, even as the cost of the upgrade rose to $60 million. Now, BSU will ask the state budget committee to re-apportion the money to the ground-source heating project.

The project could eliminate the 85,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by the current boilers. It also has the potential to decrease university operating costs, reduce dependence on coal and natural gas market fluctuations, eliminate other air pollutants, and allow the university to sell carbon credits. BSU also hopes it will create about 870 jobs, though not all will be permanent.

We talk a lot about geothermal, because the paybacks for a properly installed ground-source heating system are bigger than most conservation measures and even some renewable energy sources. The majority of energy consumption on campus buildings goes towards heating and cooling. Richard Stockton college, using a closed-loop system similar to the one that Ball State proposes, cut its electricity consumption by 25% and its natural gas uage by 70%, saving approxiamtely $330,000 in energy costs per year after an initial investment of only $5 million. BSU's plan is much more ambitious, and could lead to the biggest ground-source heating installation yet in the United States.

Here's another trend-skimming piece for you: this Los Angeles Times article highlights more than a dozen schools building green. If you already know a lot about LEED, geothermal and recycled countertops, you won't find anything revolutionary here. However, it's worth a quick read for the mentions of triple bottom line (for people, planet and profit, as put by LPA, Inc. designer Glenn Carels) and the photos of East Los Angeles College's new solar installation, which provides 1.9 million kilowatts to the campus annually.

Also note the observed effects of building green on student enrollment: "At Mills College in Oakland, the new Natural Sciences building is 90% more energy-efficient than most Bay Area laboratories. After prospective students received letters and tours highlighting the building, applications noting interest in environment and science studies spiked, said Giulietta Aquino, dean of undergraduate admissions."

One of our Chill Out! competition winners, the University of Missouri, has accomplished the admiral task of reducing their energy use by 19% per square foot since 1990, while still expanding the campus space by 60%. While this means that energy usage has still risen in the past 18 years (from 2.04 million MMBTUs to 2.66 million MMBTUs), the university estimates that its $14 million investments have returned about $28 million, providing more funds that can be funneled towards further improvements.

A recent article in the Columbia Tribune details many of the strategies they used to save energy, including high-efficiency building standards, adding biomass (corn cobs and waste wood chips) to the campus coal-fired power plant, installing motion sensors to control heating and lighting, and replacing windows.

Although the article simply skimmed over this quote from Jay Hasheider, energy management specialist at Columbia Water and Light, I want to emphasize it: "It’s very hard to achieve those reductions. It’s not just one thing; you have to work on several different fronts to get the overall building consumption down, and it gets harder and harder." Hasheider goes on to explain that as time passes, the investment needed tends to rise, because you've already taken advantage of low-hanging fruit.

Plus, as many universities are finding, once you've achieved the "quick wins" from efficiency upgrades, you run into a whole new set of problems, like the fact that your college might take the money you've saved in energy costs and give it to other departments, rather than keeping it in a revolving fund for further improvements or renewable energy purchases. Campus expansion is also a factor, as at MU. The university's total energy consumption has risen with its population, even as it becomes more efficient.

I've heard a number of different solutions to this problem, ranging from capping enrollment to purchasing carbon offsets, none of which is any kind of perfect or long-term solution. What is your college doing? Are you still on the easy and (relatively) inexpensive improvements? Or are you, like Mizzou, reaching the point where your carbon footprint is getting harder to downsize?

It's not often that a state's motto so appropriately fits the actions of its Congress: the Sunshine State of Florida recently passed a bill which allocates $8.5 million to Florida Gulf Coast University for the construction of 16 acres of solar panels. Several other Florida schools were also awarded funding, but the FGCU installation will dwarf them, producing 2 megawatts per day if the school is able to secure additional private donations. If all goes as planned, the university expects to power the entire campus with solar energy, saving $22 million in utility bills over the next 30 years.

To date, the largest university solar installations are at Fresno State (1.1 megawatts) and University of California--Irvine (1.2 megawatts), both of which will be surpassed by FGCU's. As a signatory of the AUCPCC, the university has an established Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education which provides lectures and other environmental education opportunities.

While the bill still requires the Governor's signature, he is expected to sign very soon, and school officials are already looking to begin bid requests this summer, with an eye towards bringing the system online summer 2009. We're very eager to see how the installation develops, especially given the success of solar energy in other parts of the state.

Image from FreeFoto.com

It's hard to forget about the renewable power of wind when you're in the presence of the 365 foot, 1.65 megawatt wind turbine perched near the summit of St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. A few miles from St. Olaf I get my first glimpse of the tower, which fades in and out of sight as I drive through the contours of farmland. Three huge blades spin across an otherwise unblemished skyline, efficiently harvesting "a crop of kilowatts" from the air while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

A few minutes later, I meet Pete Sandberg, Assistant Vice President of Facilities, who has agreed to give me a tour of the many green facets of campus. At each stop –- the composting building, the wetlands, the prairie, and the organic farm –- I look for the turbine to orient myself. It stands as a perpetual witness of St. Olaf’s environmental commitment, described on St. Olaf’s sustainability website as "a Statue of Liberty and a declaration of independence, freeing people from their unthinking dependence on fossil fuels." Pete informs me that the project cost a total of $2.5 million to build; $1.5 million came from the utility Xcel Energy, which Minnesota’s legislature has required to fund renewable energy projects. Annually, the turbine provides up to 1/3 of St. Olaf’s electricity, or 5.7 million kWh, and a savings of about $295,000 per year.

While the bottom line is an important consideration for St. Olaf, Pete reveals that the college is equally or more concerned about doing what is right – right for the education of its students, right for its relationship with the land, and right from a perspective of moral values and its Lutheran faith. What does this mean in practice? A diverse and dedicated group of environmental stewards on campus have worked on projects like reforesting previously mowed areas with groves of trees (which store carbon and save on fuel, equipment, and labor), developing sustainable design guidelines, which declare that the college will reuse and recycle all demolition waste (90% on a recent project, which slashed tipping fees and the energy used to manufacture new materials), and restoring agricultural and other surrounding lands to their natural condition before European settlers arrived. By incorporating a range of educational, environmental, social, and financial considerations into its decision-making processes, St. Olaf has seamlessly integrated an environmental ethic throughout the work of the college.

We head back toward the core of campus and contemplate the turbine from up close, its steady motion audible in the crisp, May breeze. I close my eyes and hear the ocean advancing and retreating along an ever-shifting shoreline. Pete tells me that initially there were comments from students in the nearest residence hall that they could hear the turbine and were concerned it might be an issue. But after a while, the concern subsided as the gentle sound receded further into the background and the structure simply became another feature of their environment.  A feature, I imagine, that is a source of pride, a symbol of our potential to safeguard the livelihoods of our children and co-exist peacefully with other species. Most of all, it is proof that colleges have the power -- whether wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass – to rekindle hope in human ingenuity and reverse our toll on the Earth’s climate.

In their spring 2006 newsletter, the Higher Education Associations’ Sustainability Consortium, HEASC, features an article titled "Campuses That Confront Global Warming Reap the Rewards" by Julian Keniry, Director of National Wildlife Federation’s Campus and Community Leadership Program. The article summarizes the threat to our planet due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, highlights lead colleges and universities in the fight to stop global warming, and lists "next steps" to reduce carbon pollution. In addition to the benefit to the environment, campuses also benefit from climate action leadership. For example, investment in clean, renewable energy will create 240,000 new jobs by 2020, says the article, giving students a better chance at a good career. Climate leadership also demonstrates greater fiscal responsibility; the longer higher education institutions work to conserve energy, the more money they save taxpayers and parents. According to Keniry, the University of Buffalo has saved an excess of $9 million annually through 200 energy focused conservation projects since the early 1980s.

HEASC is an informal network of higher education associations with a commitment to advancing sustainability within their constituencies and within the system of higher education itself.