I’ve been working on a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Survey of MICA by collecting data for the Campus Carbon Calculator. The Campus Carbon Calculator is divided into four sections: Institutional Data, Scope 1 Emissions, Scope 2 Emissions and Scope 3 Emissions.
Institutional data is “for comparison with other institutions and for projecting future emissions trends,” and includes the number of staff, faculty and students, the operational and energy budgets and the total building square feet.
Scope 1 Emissions are “direct emissions from sources that are owned and/or controlled by your institution,” and include the combustion of fuels in college-owned facilities or vehicles, fugitive emissions from refrigeration and emissions from on-campus agriculture or livestock husbandry.
Scope 2 Emissions are “indirect emissions from sources that are neither owned nor operated by your institution but whose products are directly linked to on-campus energy consumption…” This includes purchased energy: electricity, steam and chilled water.
Lastly, Scope 3 Emissions are “Other emissions attributed to your institution, deemed ‘optional’ emissions by corporate inventories. This includes emissions from sources that are neither owned nor operated by your institution but are either directly financed or are otherwise linked to the campus via influence or encouragement.” Scope 3 emissions include commercial air travel paid for by the institution, air travel for study abroad programs, faculty, staff and student commuting and ‘upstream’ emissions like those associated with making and transporting plastic silverware.
I knew that completing the survey would take more than this semester, so I decided to concentrate on Institutional data, Scope 1 Emissions and Scope 2 Emissions this spring. In the fall, before I complete the survey, I will use the contacts I’ve established to collect the most-up-to date information for the 2009 fiscal year, which ends after this academic year. The Scope 3 Emissions will be the focus of next semester.
The calculator is also set up to take data from the past 19 years – all the way back to 1990. But we only had energy records in online databases back to 2005, so that’s how far back I’m going for now – and that was plenty of work. Going back any further in time would require digging up paper records from budget offices.
I’ve gotten all of the institutional data except for the data about the staff, but it should be coming some time in the next week.
Collecting the data for the Scope 2 emissions was the most complicated part of the process. In order to determine how much electricity and natural gas MICA uses, you have to add up how much is used by each building that MICA owns – and MICA owns 22 and leases 3 properties. (When they are conducting their surveys, many schools will exclude leased properties, like the student housing at Sutton Place and faculty housing at Clipper Mill – there isn’t data about electricity or natural gas use available for these properties via the online databases I’ve been using, so they’ve been excluded by default. If I can’t find a way to get bills for them, which I probably won’t, I will make it clear in my findings that these two properties are being excluded. )
Online records are available for the annual KWH usage for each building, listed as KWH usage per month per building. These records also give annual totals for calendar years, but the data that is plugged into the calculator has to be for fiscal years, which run from June 1 to May 31st. So I needed to add up the monthly usages for each building to get totals for FY2005-2008.
But the only records related to natural gas were the natural gas bills for each fiscal year for each building. I had to convert these bills to MMBTU, or millions of British Thermal Units, the unit of measurement that I needed to plug into the calculator. First, I had to determine the cost of the gas commodity per MMBTU. It’s listed as cost per therm on the bill, so this required a conversion. Then I needed to determine what percentage of the bill was for the gas itself, and how much was for taxes and distribution. And then I needed to take the percentage of the bill that was for the gas itself and cost of the gas commodity per MMBTU and apply them to the Natural Gas bills for each FY for each building to determine the MMBTU Natural Gas used for each FY for each building
So after all of that work, I plugged the numbers into the calculator. What I noticed right away is the unusual dip in KWH electricity and MMBTU natural gas used in 2007, when student enrollment was at its highest – this seems nonsensical to me, and although I’ve combed back through the data, it is possible that I made some mathematical error, I can’t explain it right now, but anyway we’re just going to set that aside for now and take a look at the results of the calculator.
As soon as you plug in numbers to the calculator, the calculator starts crunching the numbers for you, and results with a series of summaries and graphs showing how much of each greenhouse gas is produced annually by your institution, by each scope. I think really the most valuable data pages are the annual summaries and demographic summaries – to read these you have to understand the term Carbon Dioxide Equivalents, which are: eCO2 (CO2e) = Carbon Dioxide Equivalents, a measure of each gas’ contribution to climate change relative to that of carbon dioxide (colloquially referred to as “carbon.”) For example, one molecule of (CH4) is 23 times more potent than one molecule of CO2 over the same time frame.
Those schools that have signed the American Colleges and Universities Presidents Climate Commitment are required to submit a Greenhouse Gas Emissions survey, which is published online – Pratt and Mass Art both have their surveys up, and I’ve compared them with the results from MICA so far – you can see that MICA is much closer in emissions to Pratt, even though MICA is much closer in the number of full time equivalent students and building square feet to Mass Art.
So that’s where I am for now, over the summer and into the Fall I’ll tackle: the last bits of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions – chemicals & refrigerants, Scope 3 emissions – commuting, paper, wastewater and how to make projections, including how to alter data about student growth – right now the calculator has it so student growth is continual, but I think MICA is trying to stay at a certain size student body.
Here’s how you get to the Campus Carbon Calculator:
http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/
Here’s a link to the American Colleges & Universities Presidential Climate Commitment:
http://www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/
And here’s how you get to the GGE surveys of ACUPCC signatories:
http://acupcc.aashe.org/
-Zoe Keller
