Energy pulses through our world allowing us to see in the dark, feel warmth and cold, and connect with each other. It is present in microscopic cells and in the stars that shoot across the night sky. It is in the wind, the waves, and deep within the warmth of our planet. Most often, we unlock energy by burning finite natural resources such as gas and oil. When we do, we also create high concentrations of greenhouse gases that threaten our existence. We cannot function without it, so we must change our relationship with energy.

Energy on the UBC campus heats and lights dorms and neighbourhoods, powers computers and medical equipment, ventilates labs, and milks cows. We once used it with abandon, as though it was benign and limitless. Now we understand that energy has a cost–financial and environmental.

Our long-term goal is to achieve net positive energy on campus through conservation, waste heat recovery and renewable energy sources. In other words, we aim to produce more energy on campus than is consumed. Every step towards this goal saves the University money and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. 

As campus operations experts, researchers and academics embrace the challenge, the journey to net positive energy on campus is already breaking new ground and leading the way for others.

ENERGY CONSUMPTION

It takes a lot of energy to be a leading research centre and to educate, house and employ 50,000 people. That’s why we put our human energy into finding cleaner, more efficient ways to operate our academic buildings, student and residential housing, laboratories and workplaces.

Academic Buildings – Existing

Historic academic buildings provide a unique charm to the century-old UBC campus. They comprise about 80 per cent of the campus building complement. They’re here to stay—and they show their age when it comes to energy consumption. In its early days, the UBC Campus Sustainability Office recognized that energy conservation is the first and most important step in energy management. So we targeted 300 old academic buildings for retrofit and embarked on the ECOTrek project in 2001, the largest infrastructure renewal project of its kind in Canada at that time. Phase 1 of the ECOTrek project ended in 2008. Phase 2, which is in development, will target ancillary buildings.

Once energy savings are achieved, it is important to maintain them and identify new efficiency opportunities, year after year. Going forward, campus operations will work with BC Hydro, through their Power Smart program, to continuously optimize building performance. Both technology and people play a role in reducing energy consumption. Technology allows real-time monitoring of electricity, steam and water consumption, which in turn informs building maintenance requirements. And building occupants can influence consumption by using energy wisely.

Academic Buildings - New

New buildings at UBC offer an opportunity to put the collective campus expertise into action—to capture waste energy and reuse it, to develop alternative energy supplies and even to create net positive energy buildings. As a baseline, all new buildings at UBC must be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) Gold certified or equivalent. However, some of the newest academic buildings push beyond these environmental ratings to break new ground. For example, the Fipke Centre for Innovative Research at UBC Okanagan is the first building to use the campus groundwater geoexchange energy system for heating and cooling. And at UBC’s Vancouver campus, the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), scheduled to open in 2011, will be among the highest performing buildings in North America.

Housing

As UBC evolves from a commuter campus to one where people live, work and learn, various neighbourhoods emerge, offering a range of housing choices for students, faculty and staff. They all require energy for heat and light, and to power all the comforts of home. The challenge is to create alternative energy options to service these needs. To this end, all new residential construction at UBC must comply with the UBC Residential Environmental Assessment Program (REAP) guidelines, UBC’s homegrown solution to building green. REAP ensures that homes at UBC use approximately 15 per cent less energy than Canada’s Model National Energy Code for Buildings, which in itself outperforms all provincial building codes.

Granite Terrace, a mixed-use development in the Wesbrook Place neighbourhood on campus, achieved REAP Gold certification and is a good example of UBC’s progressive industrial ecology approach to development. Waste heat harvested from the ground-level grocery store heats domestic hot water for the 77 rental suites and townhomes above.

In addition, student housing at UBC will expand significantly in the future, to provide housing for 50 per cent of full-time students, or approximately 8,000 more beds. This new student housing will model the latest energy efficiencies in keeping with LEED or REAP guidelines.

Laboratories

UBC’s laboratories are energy intensive. While research buildings represent approximately 25 per cent of campus floor space, they consume 50 per cent of the electrical energy and 60 per cent of the thermal energy. With more than 1,000 labs on campus, there are many opportunities for energy savings. For instance, the energy consumed by laboratory fume hoods in a year is equivalent to the annual energy consumption of 1,000 homes. Future energy savings can be realized by managing the operation of the fume hoods and investigating the capture and reuse of exhaust heat. A campus Green Research Program will address this opportunity and identify many others.

Workplace

With tens of thousands of computers, monitors and printers on campus, coordinated energy conservation behaviour can make a substantial difference in energy consumption. Faculty and staff Sustainability Coordinators help their departments conserve energy by encouraging their colleagues to turn off lights, turn on their computer power management settings, unplug unnecessary electrical equipment and small appliances and promote the switch to server virtualization. The IT Virtualization Initiative will enable multiple virtual computers to operate through one physical computer, realizing significant power savings. 

ENERGY SUPPLY

UBC is both a utility customer and a utility supplier. UBC buys electricity and natural gas from BC Hydro and Terasen Gas and distributes them to core academic, ancillary and tenant buildings. Electricity lights, ventilates and air conditions the campus. Natural gas fuels the District Energy System, which generates steam to heat the majority of campus buildings.

Our partnership with BC Hydro has fostered continued innovation in energy management on campus and earned UBC recognition as one of 10 Power Smart Leaders in British Columbia.

The District Energy System has enormous potential to change how UBC consumes energy. It was fuelled by coal until the early 1960s when it was switched to natural gas–an environmentally progressive decision for the time. However, today the UBC steam heating system is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions on campus and is the focus of an Alternative Energy Sources Project. The project will identify the most cost-effective options for clean, renewable energy sources, to ultimately replace the natural gas and realize significant financial and environmental savings.

BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

A key source of energy conservation for the future is not in the ground or the air, but in what we reduce through our behavior. We need to rewire ourselves to consume less and reuse what we waste. Technology can help us create efficiencies, but using energy wisely is the best way to leverage these successes. From simple habitual actions, such as turning off lights and computers, to purchasing decisions and home retrofits, we all have a responsibility to power a sustainable world.