By SHANNON O. WELLS
When constructing new buildings on campus, state-of-the-art energy efficient designs — the kind that earn a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification and contribute to Pitt’s goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2037 — are incorporated from the get-go.
“Every new building on campus is pursuing LEED certification or better,” said Emily Potoczny, engagement manager for the Pitt Sustainability. “We now have over 1.3 million square feet of LEED-certified buildings on campus, and we just certified our first Platinum project … with the renovation of the Salk Pavilion.”
Evan Petrack, senior manager of energy and utilities in the Office of Facilities Management, concurred.
“For these LEED (and) new buildings as a whole, that’s wonderful. The University has done a lot of work on those new buildings, and those new building certifications get a lot of attention,” he said. “It represents a great press and marketing opportunity.
“It’s very energizing for the campus and community as a whole.”
That said, it’s relatively rare that Pitt gets to build a perfectly energy sustainable structure from the ground up.
“A lot of University buildings are going to be around for a long time, or have been around for a long time, which is where the energy utilities and (engineering) teams come in,” Petrack said. “(We have) a lot of energy efficiency upgrades — or energy efficiency retrofits, as we call it — when you’re going back into an old building and updating or upgrading equipment over time.
“It’s not necessarily the fun, exciting, attractive work that these nice, big, charismatic, cool, new buildings are,” he added. “We’re talking about re-insulating pipes, like steam lines running up and down our buildings … replacing toilets and toilet valves. We’re talking about the trades folks that are out there every day, resealing windows, fixing grout, etc.”
Petrack and Potoczny shared these and many more insights into the use of utilities and resources — water, natural gas, electricity, chilled water, steam and solar among them — on the Pitt campus during a lunchtime webinar in July.
The presentation dived into Pitt’s utilities, their distribution, and initiatives underway to make Oakland’s buildings operate more efficiently — and how staff, faculty and students can help make a more sustainable University starting in their own offices or labs. It also outlined some of Pitt’s goals and initiatives that relate to the Climate Action Plan.
Potoczny introduced the webinar by sharing the University’s definition of sustainability, which she noted was — based on survey results — unfamiliar to “a lot of folks on campus.”
“We do think it’s really important to understanding how we approach our sustainability goals and those initiatives,” she said, noting that Pitt defines sustainability as “balancing equity, environment and economics so that current and future generations can thrive.”
“We really think that all three of those pillars have to be considered and supported through those different goals and initiatives.”
Equity is based on the idea that everybody benefits, resources are accessible and disparities that create imbalance and injustice in University systems are addressed.
“We also have to make sure our goals and initiatives make economic sense,” Potoczny said. “When we create strategies to meet our goals, we’re looking for ways to save University resources, whether that’s immediate payback or avoiding future costs.
“And our strategies have to protect the environment, ecosystems and also build resilience and ecological health.”
Informed decision making
When it comes to sustainable practices, Pitt is no Johnny-come-lately.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time,” she said. In 1990, Pitt was one of 22 signatories to the Talloires Declaration, where we committed to incorporating environment and sustainability into our teaching, our research and our operations.”
Commitments based on the 2003 Mascara Center for Sustainable Innovation initiative continue to be carried forward in their support of sustainability research, academics and community partnerships that started in the Swanson School of Engineering. “Now they support that work campuswide,” she said.
Pitt students also are “really integral” to driving sustainability forward on campus, she added, offering the “uptake and actions” following the launch of the Student Office of Sustainability in 2014.
“After that office was created and students voiced their demands for a more sustainable Pitt, the University Sustainability Committee, which is now the Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Sustainability, was created in 2016.”
In 2008, Pitt conducted its first greenhouse gas inventory, now an annual accounting of greenhouse gas emissions — carbon dioxide equivalents produced through combustion of fuels and vehicles on site, energy generation, emissions from electricity the University purchases, and campus-produced waste.
“And this is how we take account of our operational impact, by collecting data from departments all over campus — utility information, purchasing information, travel, a whole lot more — and we calculate it into a measure of carbon dioxide equivalents (that the) operation produces.”
Information from the inventory is used to inform “all kinds of decision making about how we can reach our sustainability and climate action goals and commitments,” Potoczny said, referring to the 2024 Greenhouse Gas Inventory data released this summer.
Petrack highlighted the report showing an “aggressive dip” around fiscal years 2019, 2020 and 2021, and the “bounce back up we often see in operations is from that kind of post-COVID shutdown, recommissioning and repopulation buildings and campuses,” he said.
The plan to be carbon neutral by 2037 means a net-zero emissions “calculated from a baseline year of our greenhouse gas inventory.”
The inventory shows most emissions come from energizing the campus, about 82.4%.
“A really big chunk of where our emissions are actually coming from, when you break it down … into actually what the use is on campus, a lot of it’s going into powering our campus in different ways, different utilities,” she said.
Smart water use
Another set of goals in the Sustainability Plan are specifically related to reducing energy and water use intensity by 50% by 2030, which fits in with Pitt’s demand-reduction strategy and Climate Action Plan.
“Reducing energy and water intensity will require a couple of different strategies, including building efficiency upgrades,” she said, with efficiency measured by LEED standards, indicated by certificates “you might have seen on some buildings around campus.”
Pitt is renovating and constructing buildings to use energy and water the most efficiently through updates including the building envelope; heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC); lighting systems; and more.
The University’s chilled water plants provide cool water to the fans and air handlers and ductwork throughout campus buildings. “There are other end uses for chilled water as well, such as research and laboratory (and) what we call process uses,” Petrack noted.
“We don’t have a ton of natural gas on campus. It’s used primarily for heating as well as for cooking and a few other incidental uses like that,” he said.
The new upper campus Central Utilities Building (CUB) includes “very large-scale chillers.”
“These are pieces of equipment using a lot of electricity, taking in water from the public water supply from Pittsburgh water, as well as using reclaimed water from our water reclamation system here on campus,” Petrack said. “This is an example of where we generate chilled water that is then used to provide cooling and serve process loads downstream across the rest of campus.”
The CUB also has cisterns that collect water from different end uses, such as from HVAC processes, that can be reclaimed and then reused. “We’re capturing stormwater and filtering it and cleaning that as well,” Petrak said.
These “alternative water sources” go through processes to remove physical imperfections and make sure the chemistry is acceptable. “Then they are used back up in a piece of equipment called cooling towers, which have a basically giant water basins with fans that spin very, very fast … and evaporate heat out of water so the chillers don’t have to work as hard.”
Some chillers have cooling towers, where a “good percentage” of warm air being returned from various campus spaces is rejected through evaporation, “so the chillers don’t use quite as much energy.”
Petrack gave credit to the team of mechanical engineers, contractors and consultants who design the plants to make sure they are operationally and economically efficient.
Solar power expansion
Regarding the campus electricity supply, Petrack said Pitt still purchases “a lot of our electricity from the grid … approximately 35%. With that in mind, we know we’re going to have to do quite a bit to meet that commitment of procuring or producing 50% renewables by 2030 and 100% by 2037.
Pitt’s fuel or energy “feed stock” includes renewables, nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas.
Pitt recently joined the Western Pennsylvania Energy Consortium, comprising organizations, municipalities, nonprofits and others.
“We are procuring energy in concert with each other, so that we can collectively — city, county, West View Borough, Pittsburgh water — get that energy at the best, most competitive price possible. Because the more … megawatt hours you have to bid, the better price you’ll get from the big providers.”
Potoczny touted the increased use of solar power capacity on campus.
“It’s coming from the rooftops of buildings that are under construction and coming online in the next few months and years, and that’s because they were designed to be solar ready,” she noted. “The siting of the rooftop in comparison to the buildings around it, these new buildings are being built to be as high capacity for solar as they can be given our urban environment.”
Potoczny concluded the presentation by encouraging those interested in learning more about sustainability to take part in Pitt Green Suite.
“It’s a suite of designation programs that offer a more supported way to make sustainable change in everyday business operations and work on campus,” she said.
“These programs are really a tool, kind of scaffolding for you to review all of these best practices that we’ve been talking about related to how you use energy on campus … assess what you’re already doing and decide additional actions that you’d like to take in the future.”
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