RIT Commits to Climate Neutrality

By Peter Iglinski

Henrietta, NY – A growing number of colleges and universities across the country are committing themselves to the environment in a big way. The idea is to go beyond simply reducing greenhouse gases.

Among the universities on the list is the Rochester Institute of Technology, which has built a reputation of putting theory into practice.

WXXI's Peter Iglinski went to the campus to find out how it plans to follow through on its new commitment.
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It's one thing to work toward reducing greenhouse gases. It's entirely another to promise that your university will be climate-neutral--that is, have no negative impact on the environment. But RIT President Bill Destler did just that.

"I had no second thoughts whatsoever...Whether you believe in global warming or not, it's quite clear that the world cannot to consume scarce resources at anything like the current rate and maintain anything like our global standard of living."

A coalition of college and university presidents formed three-years-ago for the express purpose of achieving climate neutrality. It began with 152 supporters. To date, 675 presidents have gotten behind the effort.

Destler says there's no easy way to solve the problem. One emphasis will be increasing RIT's use of renewable energy sources. Destler says, right now, one-third of the university's energy needs are met by renewable sources. He wants that figure to increase. He says it will take a combination of things, including wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear.

As RIT works toward becoming climate neutral, Destler says "job one" has already been taken care of.

"We recently replaced our entire heating and cooling infrastructure--reduced our energy consumption by 30 percent as a result."

Two-years-ago, RIT had more than 40 boilers and chillers for about five million square-feet of space. Today, there are nine units--five boilers and four chillers. Mike Bice is foreman of Engineering Services.

"The combustion of the boilers themselves is much more efficient, whereas we reclaim a lot of the heat that's going up in the stack to preheat the water going to the boiler. And we also control the knocks on these boilers which we never did on the old system, so they're more pollution, green-friendly."

The new system is so efficient that Bice says the boilers actually operate at a lower output.

The person responsible for operating the new heating and cooling system is Cathy Ahern, the Director of Engineering for Facility Management. She says chillers are important all year-round to cool places like computer rooms. And Ahern explains that the new chiller system takes advantage of Rochester winters.

"We do not have to run refrigerant, a gas, if you will, or a large chiller, because we're using the outside...We use a cooling tower. Water goes into that and it uses the wonderful Rochester 30, 32, 35 degree air, if not colder, and that cools the water, as opposed to running a huge chiller with refrigerant."

The installation of the new boilers and chillers is just now being completed at a total cost of 35-million-dollars. The old system lasted about 40-years. Ahern hopes to get an additional ten out of the new one.

If anyone at RIT knows about "going green" it's Nabil Nasr. He directs the Golisano Institute for Sustainability. It's dedicated to the ideal of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. He thinks going climate-neutral is entirely possible.

"It involve[s] lot of things. The question is how much time it takes you to get there. But I think definitely there are a lot of advanced [technologies] and a lot of things that we can do on campuses [to] allow us to...achieve that goal."

Nasr says a baseline report is currently being developed to help RIT better understand where it is in terms of being environmentally-friendly and what it needs to do. Nasr has a list of priorities, which includes transportation on campus and to campus, and power generation. There's also the issue of electronic devices. All campuses have computers and other gadgets. But when you're talking about a major technical university with 20,000 students, faculty and staff--the reliance on high-tech equipment is above the norm. Nasr is hoping for ways to lower the power requirements for electronic devices.

"Even when you put your computer in a sleep mode, it still [consumes] a lot of power. And if we can find a way to lower the power when the computer is in a sleep mode, for example, that would have a big impact on our consumption."

The timing for the climate-neutral effort couldn't be better for Nasr. RIT is in the design phase for a new building for the Center for Sustainability. Nasr says it will be a test lab for how to construct environmentally-friendly buildings.

While the ultimate goal is saving the earth, there's an additional benefit. President Destler says going green is also cost-effective.

"It used to be said that going green was actually expensive. But it's really not true any more. We estimate that building a green building, as opposed to a normal building, might cost us as much as five percent more in the construction, which is very small, and we recover that almost instantly because of energy savings and water savings and other kinds of savings that occur because of the construction."

Destler admits the goal of climate-neutrality is ambitious, but he says signing the commitment was a "no-brainer." As an academic community, Destler says RIT needs to serve as an example for society-as-a-whole.