If you don’t know by now that incandescent lights are out of favor, you haven’t been paying attention.
Incandescent bulbs, which are essentially space heaters that happen to also provide a small amount of light, are inefficient and burn out quickly, and are one of the first things to go in energy-efficiency campaigns on campus. compact fluorescents last far longer, emit less heat, use less electricity, reduce carbon emissions, and can be installed in existing fixtures. So, when a university is looking for a quick turnaround on their energy expenses, they change out their bulbs. It’s an easy call.
But at the rate technology changes, it’s no surprise that light-emitting-diode lights—known as LEDs—are being heralded as the next frontier. They use less electricity than compact fluorescents, reducing the electricity burden even further. Proponents also argue that their light is more welcoming than that of fluorescents, and that they don’t contain the trace amounts of mercury present in compact fluorescent bulbs. An article in The New York Times cited studies suggesting that “a complete conversion to [LED] lights could decrease carbon-dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years; in the United States, lighting accounts for about 6 percent of all energy use.”
LEDs are a little more work, however. They require new fixtures, are more expensive than compact fluorescents, and are still being perfected by university and corporate researchers. They also have a longer payback: Arizona State University will be spending about $1.5-million to retrofit six parking structures with LEDs, expecting to recoup $127,000 annually in energy and maintenance savings. Institutions that do use LEDs are mostly installing them outdoors, in locations where directional, rather than diffused, light is needed.
In a wry paradox, outdoors is precisely where the space-heating qualities of traditional lights are the most handy, at least in colder regions of the U.S. and Canada. Snow that covers an incandescent outdoor bulb is quickly melted off, but a university that has installed LEDs may find itself in the position of having to clear these lights manually, as the bulb itself no longer serves this function. So in certain cases there may be justification for keeping the higher-consumption bulbs, at least until light fixtures are redesigned to be self-clearing. On the other hand, installing incandescent lights in Arizona or New Mexico would seem, at this point, to border on frivolous.
The point I’m making is that lighting is region- and situation-specific, like everything else in sustainability. Renewable-energy opportunities vary wildly, from solar energy in the Southwest to geothermal in parts of Oregon to wind in the Midwest. The efficiency of any heating and air-conditioning system depends on condition and uses of the building in question—on its age, materials, insulation, temperature and humidity fluctuations, functions, and occupants. And while some colleges can purchase the majority of their food from within a 100-mile radius, most can’t.
Long-term sustainability is not a formulaic process. What works in one region is almost guaranteed not to work—or work as well—in another. Campus sustainability coordinators have a difficult job, not only “trying to turn around the Titanic that is a university bureaucracy,” as one described it to me recently, but simply finding and understanding the mass of data necessary to do their work. Unlike a franchise that endlessly duplicates itself, creating a sustainable university requires sensitivity to changing conditions and willingness to triple-check the numbers.
This is especially important to consider in light of last week’s deadline for Presidenta’ Climate Commitment signatories to submit climate-action plans. The plans, which map out each university’s strategy for limiting emissions over a period of decades, are crucial precisely because they require an institution to gather numbers and understand their regional, technological, and administrative challenges. The difficulty of this task is underscored by the fact that 137 of these institutions, about 36 percent, have applied for extensions.
Scott Carlson reports elsewhere in The Chronicle that the plans differ as much as might be expected. Cornell University intends to use geothermal energy and cogeneration to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, while the University of California system (10 campuses in all) has put its focus on energy efficiency and building retrofits, paid for largely by state grants, and has declined to set a firm date for reaching zero net emissions.
As to which is “superior,” it’s hard to tell this early. If the example of LED lights I’ve described above teaches anything, it’s that one institution’s process will necessarily look quite different from another’s, making it difficult to draw a map of what a successful sustainability plan looks like. There may in fact be no universally useful method, which seems almost quaint in the age of mass production and globalization.
Instead, a focus on the local, the specific, and the measurable seems to be one of the strengths of the Presidents’ Climate Commitment. The flexibility of the commitment, which sets a high bar but allows colleges to fumble their own way towards it, makes for a clumsy process but perhaps a more attainable one. —Xarissa Holdaway
Xarissa Holdaway, a frequent Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, is campus e-news coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s campus-ecology project. You can read her previous posts here.
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