Nobody better understands the push and pull of competing line items on a budget than a college administrator. How do you balance the needs of your students with the demands of a constantly changing economic environment and what might be an aging physical plant? So any conversation about sustainable energy has to start from a pragmatic place. How do you take the right steps to both operate within your current budget while also creating a new, sustainable infrastructure for the decades to come?
It starts with small steps.
It’s never been easier to get community-wide buy-in for sustainability efforts on college and university campuses. Going greener is obviously good for the environment, but there’s also a powerful story to tell about the substantive benefits of sustainable energy when it comes to both enrollment and budgeting.
In 2009, the Princeton Review’s College Hopes and Worries survey collected the opinions of more than 10,000 prospective students. More than 60 percent of those said they wanted more information about a school’s commitment to the environment. Fast forward to 2019 and nearly a quarter of the students in the same survey said they’d be evaluating a school’s commitment to the environment “strongly” when considering where to enroll. The reality is that framing and touting your school’s commitment to sustainable energy is a crucial part of any recruitment strategy—and especially important at a time when enrollment has been declining for a decade.
There’s no question some sustainable energy projects like Rutgers University’s installation of a $40 million, 32-acre solar array can be complex and expensive. But Rutgers qualified for numerous grants and credits, and the array produces more than $1.7 million worth of electricity per year. The 15-year-old project is now revenue positive, and a template for solar projects undertaken by schools like Bucknell over the last several years.
Even schools that have long relied on antiquated oil-burning technology to fuel their steam boilers have options that don’t require tens of millions of dollars of investment in new power systems. Like many schools in the northeast, Harvard still relies on oil-fueled heat in some of its buildings. The school announced an ambitious sustainability program to be carbon neutral by 2026 and fossil fuel free by 2050. To get there, they’re combining new investments in alternative energy like solar and wind with replacing the petroleum-based oil burned in their boilers with recycled vegetable oil. The plant-based oil is a carbon neutral product that burns more than 86 percent cleaner than conventional oil. The oil program is a particularly attractive win for the school because it doesn’t require a huge up-front investment and recycled vegetable oil costs roughly the same as the fuel it replaces.
Administrators at schools like the College of the Atlantic and University of Colorado are pairing sustainable energy programs on the supply side with similar programs addressing energy demand to attack the issue on both ends.
The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine is constructing student housing out of highly-insulating recycled material and installing composting toilets and pellet stoves inside to reduce the buildings’ energy draw. That’s just one of the reasons the school was No. 1 on the Princeton Review’s list of “Green Schools” for 2024. At Colorado, the school’s E-Center promotes free bus rides, bicycle repair and e-bike rental for students, and established a zero-waste goal for campus cafeterias that has not only reduced food costs but cut down the number of refuse truck trips—and the exhaust pollution that comes with that.
Stanford, the University of Wisconsin and UCLA are just a few of the schools that have saved money and reduced environmental impact by switching from traditional cleaning chemicals to aqueous ozone-based cleaners. In addition to eliminating many dangerous chemicals from campus, the sustainable cleaning solution uses 90 percent less water, 83 percent less plastic packaging and 72 percent less cardboard—all of which reduces strain on the school’s energy, water and waste disposal infrastructure.
Treading water isn’t an option. Find a collection of peer schools and benchmark their sustainable energy programs to see where you stand, then start taking some of these steps to a greener future.
