Secrets to Campus Energy Success: Constructing a Comprehensive Energy Strategy

Reduce and switch. These are the two sides of the same coin for campuses striving to achieve climate action goals while reigning in energy costs: reduce total energy consumption through energy efficiency, and switch to renewable energy. Both are needed to create a comprehensive energy strategy.

Achieving the aggressive sustainability and climate goals many schools have set — and capturing the positive economic value embedded within them — requires an intentionally designed, comprehensive strategy, including:

• Load reduction,
• Efficiency and renewable energy,
• An analysis and prioritization of opportunities, and,
• A plan for financing and implementation.

Comprehensive energy strategies balance competing priorities such as costs, timing, campus interruption, and greenhouse gas savings by sequencing opportunities in a rational order — one that wrings out the most energy savings and piles up the biggest cost reductions.

That’s why Edison Energy is sponsoring a daylong, pre-Conference workshop at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE) fall Conference and Expo in San Antonio, Texas, October 15 – 18, 2017.  Like many of our higher education customers, Edison Energy is a proud AASHE member.

The workshop, titled “Secrets to Campus Energy Success: Constructing a Comprehensive Energy Strategy,” will be held on Sunday, Oct. 15 from 8:30 – 4:30 p.m.

I will be leading the workshop, along with my colleagues Lindsey Cohen, Client Services, and Thomas Szarawarski, Engineering, as well as our clients Rob Andrejewski, Director of Sustainability, and George Souleret, Director of Utilities and University Engineer, both from the University of Richmond.

The workshop will help attendees develop a comprehensive energy strategy that includes:

• Planning
• Stakeholder engagement
• Energy conserving behavioral changes
• Audits
• Ongoing commissioning
• Efficiency retrofits
• Monitoring
• Onsite renewables
• Offsite renewables

It will also include case studies from the University of Richmond and Boston University.

If your institution is thinking about renewables, be sure to check out a recent report published by Edison Energy and the University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute that looks at higher education’s renewable energy efforts to date.

Visit the AASHE Conference website to register for the workshop. I hope to see you in San Antonio!