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Facilities Management and the Office of Sustainability are actively preparing for and responding to new challenges in climate regulation, efficient technologies research, and applications for responsible and appropriate energy consumption.
A wide range of energy-saving strategies coexist on campus, and each strategy works to support the President's Climate Commitment and Western's Climate Action Plan. At present, Facilities Management is overseeing Western's investment in an Energy Savings Company called McKinstry, an independent contracting agency whose expertise is in energy conservation measures. McKinstry is working with Western to locate areas in the university's infrastructure that can achieve greater energy-conservation.
The three primary, interconnected goals of the ESCO project are to lower energy costs, minimize resource consumption, and neutralize Western's carbon footprint via reduced greenhouse gas emissions. "[Our] report is a foundation document" McKinstry wrote in their findings summary, a document "that will lead to utility efficiency and carbon footprint reduction." The construction project based on these findings is expected to begin in November 2011 and anticipated to end around December 2012. The funding for the project will be through a State Treasury loan and is expected to make investment returns in 10 to 12 years through energy and utility cost savings.
An Energy Savings Company, referred to as an ESCO, is a business strategy that emerged to meet investment needs during the energy crisis of the 1970s, usually as a small division of large company employed to isolate and mitigate total operational energy-related costs. Little has changed in the need for large-scale conservation strategies, though ESCO initiatives declined through the 1990s as national energy marketing policies underwent deregulation and cheap energy resources fattened America's economy.
In today's market we have renewed our focus on resource conservation, responsible stewardship, and reducing energy consumption—this time on a global scale. Western has been ahead of the national curve in efforts to curb energy consumption on an institutional level, as well as in extracurricular categories such as promoting alternative means of transportation, academic initiatives, and community education programs in sustainability.
On the campus, Facilities Management and the Office of Sustainability are playing an important role in maintaining Western's sustainable image and overall success as a conscious consumer, and each works diligently to uphold the university's priorities in resources stewardship.
The current project is unique because it is a multi-building investigation and campus-wide retrofitting project. Typically an ESCO is completed in a single building or for a specific issue within an industry's infrastructure.
In 2008, for example, Western commissioned an ESCO prior to completing the Buchanan Towers addition. In 2011, the university, following a Facilities Management initiative, is tackling the issue of energy conservation from a holistic view, incorporating many different aspects of resources conservation and strategies to reduce energy consumption into a single conservation initiative. Some of the retrofits that are in-progress include new HID and LED lighting in outdoor areas, energy efficient indoor lighting, improved insulation in attic spaces, reducing outside air circulation into unoccupied buildings, and installing CO2 sensors in lecture halls to monitor air conditioning. By installing these and other sustainable technologies, Facilities Management is estimating Western will save a little over $231,000 dollars annually. Additional revenue savings will be generated through rebates distributed by Puget Sound Energy when Western begins putting power back into the PSE power grid.
"Western will reinvest these rebates into continuous, self-sustaining conservation projects" said Facilities Management Director John Furman, who is excited about the direction Western is going in resource conservation.
Furman, along with Seth Vidaña, Campus Sustainability Manager, are consistently looking for new ways to conserve the university's budget through operations improvements. Large-scale operational strategies, such as an ESCO, represent a significant portion of Western's accomplishments in sustainable technology but are not long-term solutions on their own. Long-term resource conservation is achieved when individuals take accountability for personal energy use, using only what is needed when it is needed.
To facilitate conservation on a personal level, the Office of Sustainability launched the 10x12 Program in 2009, an initiative to promote carbon reduction through alternative use strategies for electricity, natural gas, and water. The "10 by 12" initiative hopes to reduce Western's baseline energy use at least 10 percent by the year 2012 through both facilities improvements and behavioral changes.
"WWU set an ambitious target" Vidaña said, "and we have been highly impressed with the campus response. The challenge has generated numerous creative solutions in the quest for efficiency, and linked faculty, staff and students together in the process." 10x12 is actively pursued in academic buildings across campus and is received with growing enthusiasm and participation by the Western community each year. Two years into the program and we have already reduced Western's energy use by 7 percent," Vidaña continued, "In the following year we may even exceed our 10 percent reduction goal."
With the cooperative efforts of individuals across campus Western is well on the way to a sustainable future, accomplishing the goals of the Climate Action Plan, and setting a standard of excellence for other institutions of higher learning both regionally and globally. 