Energy Task Force

Energy Task Force

12/5/13

Summary

Summary of Conversation Topics

WildCAP

• WildCAP in its next phase of writing.
• Subcommitee will be finalizing the draft in the spring, sending first to full ETF for approval and then out to the broader UNH community.

UNHM and Law School

• Will be including both campuses in a system level energy purchasing contract this spring. Maybe this spring would be a good time to ask them.
• For source 1 emissions we will eventually have that information to move forward on a joint purchasing endeavor.

Update on Provost Council Meeting

• Last week Paul Meet with PC to discuss many different things with Dick Cannon to go over a lot of issues with different department heads.
• Wanted the importance of research vs. the importance of energy savings in the building. Big issues recently are complaints from research faculty coming in on off hours to offices that are unheated/not cooled

Updates and Announcements

• Cam’s 405 presentations were the same day of the meeting. Would like for his facilitators to present to the ETF at the February meeting

Key Agreements

• Having a top-down-level letter or statement about integrating the other campuses into energy work would be helpful in going forward on our work with them
• A current student should replace Alex Fried on WALRUS committee, as he would be treated now as a vendor since he’s not a current student.

Outstanding Questions

• Does anyone have any contacts at UNHM or the Law School that would be good for us to have going forward?

Next Steps

The group identified the following next steps (or commitments) during the meeting:

What / Who / By When
Revisit WildCAP sections to add in anything new and update the templates / All / January
WildCAP writing team will begin meeting in the spring semester / Sara, Cam, Peter, Ryley, Tom, Jackie, Beth, Matt, Steve / Will begin in January

Energy Task Force

12/5/13

Detailed Notes

Table of Contents

• Participants
• WildCAP updates
• Discuss how UNH Manchester and UNH Law School can potentially related to WildCAP in the future
• Update on Provost Council Meeting
• Announcements from ETF members

Participants

1

Energy Task Force – 12/5/13 Page

• Sara Cleaves
• Jackie Cullen
• El Farrell
• Tat Fu
• Filson Glanz
• Matt O’Keefe
• Lisa Pollard
• Beth Potier
• Sarah Smith
• Cameron Wake
• Peter Wilkinson

1

Energy Task Force – 12/5/13 Page

Facilitator: Matt O’Keefe

Content Manager: Jackie Cullen

Review updated WildCAP timeline and process: Sara

Timeline

• Based on conversation at last ETF meeting, drafted a timeline. We are forming a subcommittee that will finalize the drafts done so far. The team will probably meet once a month January through March and we’ll come back to the full ETF with a draft at the end of March so we would have something in April to share with the campus community via survey monkey link, and CJ story to get feedback.
• We will send the links to the heads of staff councils, student/faculty senates etc. for rollout. Once we have a draft that will be shared with President’s and provost councils. We are aiming for June to have a final copy of WildCAP done.
• A draft has been put into a Google doc, if you haven’t gotten it already you will get it.
• If you haven’t had a chance to prioritize recommended actions for your section, now is the chance to do that: short term, medium- and long-term goals. Look at the template for sections on how to do that.
• We’re doing this to focus on sections highlighted on page two of Sara’s handout: Curriculum, research/engagement, WALRUS, adaptation, behavior/culture section.
• Particularly pulling out suggestions for air travel and commuting.
• If you have edits or comments, they need to get in before we send this out to the greater campus population, which we will be doing. Need to make sure ETF is comfortable with what we’re putting in here.
• Trying to highlight that commuting and air travel are a huge chunk of the remaining pie to get to the goals we want to have. If there are better ways to say what we need to say, now is the time to speak up.
• Cam: 405 students have taken on video conferencing as a way to tackle air travel. The goal is to reduce it by 50% but doing so by having a beautiful place on campus to video conferencing, including free catering etc.
• Flip side: everyone that does travel pays a small tax that will fund the free catering/room for the video conferencing room. It’s not saying don’t travel, it’s saying why travel?
• Wanted to try to follow the “right-sizing” policy that Steve has done for dept. vehicles. Incentivizing Zipcar/train/bus and non-air options.
• A great idea that we need to bring up to the cabinet level. President Huddleston was talking yesterday about the standard issues, too expensive, increasing tuition above inflation. Paul college building has every classroom and break out room set up for video conferencing and they are all getting a lot of use.
• Travel is an easier sell that a lot of other things. It’s an easier way to tell people that they can get done what they need to AND they don’t have to travel.
• Faculty would be OK with a couple of times of year vs. 8 or 10
• Who is on writing subcommittee?
• Cam, Tom, Matt, Jackie, Ryley, Peter, Steve, Mike and Beth
• What’s the date that’s needed before the writing team gets together?
• Read through the draft now before meeting in January
• Curriculum has a draft, Adaptation was only Lou and is smaller
• Tom and Cam should have a good start on curriculum/adaptation sections before meeting again in January
• WALRUS: Alex Fried is listed as a member, didn’t he graduate?
• He’s doing a waste audit here through PLAN
• Is it a conflict to have him doing business with us and being on the writing team (Lisa)
• He’s getting paid for his work, he is now a vendor not a student, having the lines crossed can get messy, unless you have other non-UNH entities on the other groups
• If it was open to others, that’s fine but it looks bad this way
• Instead of Alex, another Trash to Treasure student (current)
• Have we purposefully decided not to talk about our university investments as part of WildCAP?
• Not sure where it would fit in
• We’re focused on Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, where would that fit?
• Thinking about whom WildCAP is for, it serves a purpose with PCC, see it as helping us put together a document that’s good for us. Giving us dates to help push us get things done.
• In terms of this document being for us, last year it (divestment) was tabled, we didn’t want o get involved, bring it up again: is it left out because it doesn’t fit?
• Matt: would say that it doesn’t fit
• If it was included would it take the focus away from what we really want people to look at
• Want this to be the true working document for what we’re planning on achieving
• ETF could issue a statement and focus solely on divestment, Paul, last year, was uncomfortable doing that.
• Divestment will come out next August with new STARS score. Is still a big gap that stands out in that reporting
• Question on communication:
• Thought more about the short video?
• On the list of communications once we’re done with the plan (wildCAP)
• Doing a campus journal story, whole suite of communications to be sent out.
• Has UNH media thought of doing a “white board” video? Video of a hand illustrating on a white board
• Takes a different skill set, to Beth’s knowledge no one has tried to do.
• Cam did one with an outside vendor, cost $1000 and had two drafts
• It’s a great way to present data in a compelling way.
• If we’re trying to tell a more human story it’s not the best option.
• **adding charging stations to campus – is it in transportation section already?

Discuss how UNH Manchester and UNH Law School can potentially related to WildCAP in the future

• Typically have only focused on Durham, want to start considering other campuses as part of UNH, potentially Granite State College.
• These campuses don’t have the type of expertise that we do on this campus. Wouldn’t have to tailor anything specific to them but to let them know what we’re doing and see if there’s anyone of interest at these locations.
• The guess is there is one person at each that has many things under their control but they don’t have the contact to us.
• Does anyone have any contacts they know of that they think would be a good contact going forward?
• We don’t get too involved with the operational stuff on other campuses, but we’re going to look at trying to help them out. If this is worthwhile to being included in the future.
• Will be including both campuses in a system level energy purchasing contract this spring. Maybe this spring would be a good time to ask them.
• For source 1 emissions we will eventually have that information to move forward on a joint purchasing endeavor.
• Will be big on commuting, includes faculty that commute between Durham and Manchester campuses, perhaps multiple times per week.
• We didn’t get legs as an ETF until the president at the time identified a need. The mid-level personnel will be those doing the work.
• Can we get something from the president that says we’d like to get you into the fold, goes to the dean at UNHM and UNH Law need to have something from the top that says ETF is important
• Having a meeting at their location would be a good idea, meet and greet, maybe having their dean show up and talk a little bit on how to move forward. Not just asking do you have energy data but saying we’d like to bring you into the fold of our GHG emissions inventory, that’s the tool we’ve really used and leveraged. What’s the two-year plan to collect this information? How to bring it into WildCAP.
• Right now if we tried to involve the Law School right now would not be a good idea as they are just going through converting over to UNH systems. Later in the spring would be better.
• Will be having a continuing discussion on this in future meetings. In the meantime Lisa can informally ask if anyone over there does collect anything.

Outcomes of provost council meeting

Update from Matt:

• Last week Paul Meet with PC to discuss many different things with Dick Cannon to go over a lot of issues with different department heads.
• Wanted the importance of research vs. the importance of energy savings in the building. Big issues recently are complaints from research faculty coming in on off hours to offices that are unheated/not cooled.
• They have shown that they don’t like that approach and would like to have the space warm at any given hour.
• Paul approached them on whether they support that or is the energy savings and climate commitment more important to our campus.
• Paul didn’t really get much of a solid answer, which was to be expected. At this point lets do some data collection, meaning do we have any spots that are temperature critical that should be treated differently i.e. is an office being converted to a server room when it shouldn’t be etc. Find a way to keep the temperature more common or renovate the space to make things easier.
• Didn’t get an answer but at least the discussion has started asking “what do you want from us?”
• Tom sent out a very detailed email about why we should be on the side of reducing emissions and minimizing emissions.
• Continuous discussion of controlling our costs are competing with some other issues that we have going on on this campus.
• How many complaints have we gotten?
• A floor worth of folks at Gregg Hall where some adjustments were made. The pattern wasn’t changed but mechanical failure heightened the issue.
• Not fixing an issue quick enough exaggerated complaints.
• This will impact climate emissions, energy costs, etc. If they tell us that’s ok with them and agree to pay more and our emissions are going to go up then that is likely how we will go forward.
• Q: challenge of charge per square foot. Is there a surcharge for keeping the temperatures where they would like? Do they need this every night for the next five years, or just once or twice per semester? Do you actually have the temperature data from the room or does it need to be gathered?
• Everything we’re talking about here are locations where a temperature setting will be shut down when no one is here in off hours.
• Have a mechanism in place to charge more for those who use more. Having people pay their fair share would be a huge shift in cost the first year, budgets might not be able to handle it. Will lead to a lot of other discussions.
• There is a process every few years to come up with the overhead rate, breakdown the higher cost of research but don’t actually bill based on that.
• Was brought up at the meeting how much it costs to run Murkland vs. Rudman as an example.
• Have been pushing getting the buildings off of RCM, sometimes it gains some momentum but fades when people see the impact.
• The power of those groups, research groups might have just a little more power than the groups who aren’t using a lot.
• The COLA’s of the world might not have as much weight as the engineering department and other research departments.
• Has been proposed many times over the years, gains traction when people realize we can start to see some savings.
• Two thoughts: (Beth) I think what we’re talking about in changing the payment system only if it incentivizes people to use less energy.
• Is a lab manager going to say the lab can’t be used on weekends because it’s unaffordable. Are they going to start running space heaters?
• The issue is less on heat and more on A/C. Running some level of heat to the building regardless so things don’t freeze.
• In the summertime the air is shut off completely, coming in to turn it on would run a huge system for just one room.
• Dining/Housing: Self-sustaining Auxillary systems: pay their own bills. They are doing their own efficiency projects, Facilities helps them out with ideas, they have no problem funding it because they see the return.
• A lab manager might not be touting it, but their dean might see the savings, and tell them that they will have to deal with the temperatures as they are on weekends.
• Making people pay and see their energy costs would make a huge change. It would come down to the lab managers if they were to see their direct costs and thus savings. Incentives are important to get people to act.
• Don’t see us ever getting to a surcharge, new income stream that doesn’t exist.
• Does it make sense to have a more global letter of intent from ETF on this?
• Easy letter to write: want to reduce the cost of tuition = reduce the cost of energy.
• Is there separate metering?
• Our software tracks the net sq. footage, know what dept. uses what portion of a building. CAN do it pretty easily, would be somewhat watered down within a building. Doing an efficiency project for just the dept. within a building might get difficult without pulling in the others.
• Working on a system for the out buildings that can have temperature limits so the heat can be cranked as high as someone “wants”, but it will only hit a certain temperature.
• Can emails be sent out to each department breaking down the office space, sending it to the administrative assistants? Students in dorm rooms too?
• We’ve done it on an annual level, “report cards” have been done by SI.
• What’s the motivation for a student who’s not seeing directly the costs or savings? Reality being that it will impact the following or two years down the road bills.
• Got away from sending stuff out campus wide because we were told to stop sending stuff out campus wide.
• Can we repackage the annual report cards?
• One way: a briefing on energy use of buildings on campus. Discuss the “dirty dozen” on campus. Tat is formally nominated to write that briefing by Cam.
• Changing temperatures and making different departments unhappy creates a complaint system where Matt etc. are bypassed and it goes right up to Paul’s level.
• Making progress because the second issue has been raised to a higher level.
• Don’t need everybody’s buy – in just need 2/3 and that can create change.
• Perhaps we do have to run a few floors all the time but those departments will pay for it.
• It might get us where we want to be as we continue discussion and present WildCAP.
• The argument between colleges is that English and others can do their work more easily from home or other locations. Engineering and others have to meet a student in off hours.
• We know this is the system, but the faculty’s office is the same office as the English professor.
• Potentially in years passed it wasn’t such an issue because energy costs were lower.
• People coming in to work on the weekends shouldn’t expect to have their office warm. A lab is different but should we be catering to every person’s needs on campus?
• Would be another $50,000 annually to run the floors in question in Gregg Hall.
• Dick and Paul are not going back to the council to discuss the Gregg hall issues at this point.

Updates and announcements from task force members

Date for 405 presentations