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December 05, 2008, 02:36 PM ET
City U. of New York Works to Make Existing Buildings Greener
Nice as might be to have a new, high-profile green building to impress visitors to your campus, an item in the City University of New York’s Sustainable Times newsletter serves as a good reminder that colleges can also do a lot to make their existing structures greener.
The item (it’s the third one in the newsletter) says that energy-efficiency projects and infrastructure upgrades dating back to the early 1990s have “reduced CUNY’s per-square-foot energy consumption approximately 12 percent and its greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent since 1992.” The savings, the newsletter says, came while the university added 4.5 million square feet of new space — and while the spread of technology brought “thousands more energy-consuming computers and their peripherals into the campuses.”
Now New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, wants the university system to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by another 30 percent by 2017. The university has adopted a four-point plan to get started:
A new online system for monitoring utility meters will provide real-time usage data and identify “areas of excessive use.” New LED- and induction-based light fixtures will save electricity, improve the quality of light in classrooms, and eliminate the hazardous-waste problems caused by fluorescent bulbs. Lighting accounts for 40 percent of buildings’ energy use, the university says. A “retro-commissioning” effort will examine the components of heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems to make sure that they’re all the right size and that they’re working together as efficiently as possible, without either oversized components that use more power than necessary or bottlenecks that force other components to work extra hard to compensate. HVAC systems, the university says, account for another 40 percent of buildings’ energy use. An effort to restore building envelopes will check windows, doors, roofs, and insulation—and make fixes where necessary—so that occupants will be more comfortable and so that buildings go easy on heat and air conditioning.
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