By Doug Sitton

As educational leaders take on decarbonization projects —renovation or new construction — IMEG recommends a four-step approach.

  1. Assess your carbon footprint
  2. Optimize building performance
  3. Electrification
  4. Integrate renewable energy

This blog will discuss the first two steps. To get started on assessing your carbon footprint, analyze your existing building or buildings’ carbon emissions and how your portfolio might change over the next 30 years. Gather and review this data:

  • Building size(s) and use(s)
  • Ownership status (owned, leased, subleased)
  • Utility supply and demand, including central utility plants, if applicable
  • Equipment inventories, including efficiencies, ages, and equipment health
  • Building automation systems
  • Plans and processes—ESG/sustainability, strategic, master, annual capital, facilities maintenance, design standards, etc.

This information can be translated into carbon emissions, based on the makeup of your local grid. Reducing emissions in the highest emitting buildings first will have the largest impact on your overall campus carbon footprint.

For a building in planning and development, use benchmarking, which provides industry-wide-available energy data for buildings of similar type and programming. Energy modeling using benchmarked data can estimate the building’s expected energy use intensity and translate that into carbon emissions based on the makeup of the local grid.

Don’t forget about embodied carbon, which has a big impact on a building’s carbon footprint and can only be addressed prior to new construction. Conducting a Whole Building Lifecycle Assessment (WBLCA) is a great way to help you understand a proposed new building’s embodied carbon. Learn more about embodied carbon here.

The second step is optimizing your building performance, i.e., reducing its energy use and carbon footprint. This includes mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structure, envelope, and site carbon impacts.

Commissioning and retro-commissioning can help find and correct energy waste due to sub-par performance of mechanical equipment. Both are quality assurance processes that involve a series of observations, testing, and corrections to ensure all building systems are operating and performing as intended and designed.

Retro-commissioning examines operations and energy use of existing buildings. If a building is not performing as intended, corrections can be made to eliminate unnecessary energy use—a crucial first step to reducing a building’s carbon footprint. Reducing energy waste can bring a quick return on investment. In the best-case scenario, these savings are reinvested in more capital-intensive and impactful improvements in the future, such as a renewable energy program.

For new construction, optimizing your project’s performance often involves evaluating passive and active design strategies that can be implemented to reduce energy consumption, energy costs, and carbon emissions. Energy modeling can analyze each strategy to prioritize which optimizations will have the most impact on your decarbonization goals.

Commissioning begins in the design phase and continues through construction and activation. Optimizing the performance of new projects in design also often includes energy analysis to evaluate passive and active design strategies.

To learn more, read IMEG’s executive guide, “Decarbonization in Education: A Practical Approach for the Built Environment.”

Or read other blogs in this series: