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Larry Eisenberg, Executive Director of
Facilities Planning for the Los Angeles Community Colleges District. |
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Flying High Off the Grid with LACCD
by Racquel Palmese
When it comes to facing environmental challenges California is the land of
big ideas. From the Governor’s Million Solar Roofs initiative to cities’
and counties’ far-reaching climate change mandates, the bar has been set
high and is constantly getting higher. One of biggest ideas of all is
coming to fruition in Los Angeles, where the Los Angeles Community College
District (LACCD),
home to almost 200,000 students, is taking all 9 of its campuses “off the
grid.”
The District’s
Energy Strategy Plan calls for, among a host of other things, the
onsite generation of several megawatts of solar power at each campus – a
megawatt is enough to power 1,000 homes, according to the California
Energy Commission and more than enough energy to completely power each
campus. The plan also includes a renewable energy central plant,
performance conservation efficiency contracts and a sustainability
curriculum tailored to the needs of each college. Excess electrical energy
will also be used to convert water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then
using the hydrogen in the evening to power fuel cells for electricity on
campus.
The LACCD has raised $2.2 billion for its sustainable construction and
renovation program, among the largest of its kind in the world. What
started in 2002, when the Board of Trustees adopted a policy calling for
10 percent of the campuses’ energy to be derived from alternative sources,
now involves over 200 architectural companies working on various aspects
of planning and development.
A combination of cutting edge technology and tried and true alternative
energy sources are being employed. Besides solar panels appearing on
parking structures and buildings throughout the campuses, one will also
soon see small power-generating windmills spinning under the eaves of
buildings generating power and suitcase-size batteries storing energy
produced during the day. Students will be tracking their school’s energy
usage at kiosks as they learn from the new curriculum being developed to
train them for “green collar” jobs.
Growing the Program
It all began with a series of bond issues. In 1999, LACCD got a $1.245
billion bond passed to fund construction and renovation. At that time, the
trustees decided to make a commitment to sustainability and mandated that
every one of the college district’s 44 planned new buildings, and every
major remodeling project, would meet the requirements for basic green
building certification under the US Green Building Council’s
LEED rating system.
In 2003, another bond measure was passed, giving the District a total of
$2.2 billion in construction funding – including money to develop a “green
curriculum.”
Larry Eisenberg, LACCD’s executive director of facilities planning and
development, is managing the District’s construction program. Last spring
a new facilities and maintenance building was christened LEED Certified ,
and the District was, as Eisenberg says, “off to the races.” All told,
230 projects are currently in process. All are expected to be completed by
2011.
“As it turns out,” he says, “we’re moving along (with basic LEED
certification) and are finding that going for Silver (LEED Silver
certification, the third highest ranking) isn’t so hard. I think we’ll get
a couple of Gold (the second highest level of certification) in the crop
as well.
Eisenberg joined LACCD in 2003. “I’ve been in sustainability most of my
career,” he says, “but I had no idea how much that commitment to
sustainability was going to mean when I took this job. I pinch myself
every day and ask myself, ‘how did I get here?’ All of a sudden I have the
money and a lot of smart people to work with to make all this possible.”
Eisenberg now heads up a team that he counts “somewhat north of 100.”
Each of the nine campuses has a project management team with eight to nine
people, and there is a program management team with forty. The goal of the
trustees, he says, goes beyond a commitment to the many local and small
businesses that are working on the construction project. “We wanted to
share the wealth. The taxpayers of Los Angeles are paying for all this, so
it returns value to the community as well. It’s fun. I love each day,
can’t wait to get up in the morning.”
Expanding Horizons
The multi-faceted project has generated international interest. Eisenberg
and Dr. Woodrow Clark II, LACCD’s energy director, spend a great deal of
time speaking about the District’s program. Clark, co-author of the book,
Agile Energy Systems, Global Lessons from the California Energy Crisis,
came to LACCD to help develop the sustainable construction program
after a stint as Governor Gray Davis’ renewable energy advisor. He
realized that while LEED certifies individual buildings, there were other
aspects to consider.
“What we’re dealing with is clusters of buildings,” he explains. “I saw a
pattern of this when I was working at the state level with shopping malls,
walking streets, office building complexes. These are all similar to
college campuses. We need to start thinking about more agile systems, not
just grid-connected ones, but those with onsite power systems.” (An “agile
system” means having a central plant providing power to a cluster of
buildings, such as a community college, but also having power being
generated on several of the buildings within the cluster. This demands
less power from the grid.)
“It’s one thing to talk about having a renewable portfolio standard,” he
explains, “but then you also have to have transmission lines for those
(offsite) wind turbines and solar arrays. We’ve now extended the LEED
program in the District to making the campuses energy independent and
carbon neutral.”
Additionally, says Clark, LACCD is now part of the Climate Registry, which
was formed in 1999 as the California Climate Registry and is now a global
initiative. The Registry calls for benchmarking energy and fuel use in
order to show reductions in a building’s carbon footprint through
utilizing renewable energy, new technologies and better control over a
building’s efficiency. All nine LACCD campuses have been registered since
2004, and estimates showing cost savings should be available this year.
The District’s program involves a three-part strategy. The first involves
installing highly efficient central plants for each college. Echoing
Clark’s agile system idea, Eisenberg says, “The best way to do energy is
to distribute it across the campus environment. The fun thing about
central plants is that there has been a strange new mix of equipment and
technology. Each of our central plants’ roofs will be covered with solar
heat tubes, the next generation of making solar hot water. These are
configured as a vacuum environment, which makes the water very hot, almost
the temperature of steam. You bring that into the central plant and you
can make hot water through a heat exchanger. As it cools you can capture
it and make chilled water out of it also and distribute it across the
college. It’s a sustainably-based technology, a great, cost effective
thing.”
In the second part the strategy, every energy-consuming item within all
LACCD’s facilities will be looked at for demand management and
retrofitting. Says Eisenberg, “We want to squeeze out every single watt
and every single therm that we can.” All energy consuming items, from
light bulbs to pumps, will be analyzed and changed out to achieve maximum
energy savings. Occupancy sensors will be installed.
The third part is what Eisenberg calls “the really exciting part, the one
that not many people are doing yet.” This involves the installation of
major photovoltaics to generate several megawatts of power at each campus.
“We’re investigating some of the new wind ideas utilizing small wind
turbines on buildings. Ground source geothermal will also be used to
supplement heating and chilling demand.”
He says that there are energy storage technologies now coming into the
marketplace that are “almost magical - the idea that you can store huge
amounts of electricity in a relatively small battery, or store hydrogen
gas in a stable way. The idea is that we can take the daytime solar energy
and carry it into the nighttime through these storage techniques.”
Together, they will make it possible for LACCD’s campuses to be off the
grid.
Is he nervous about using such new technology? Not at all. “We’re an
educational institution,” he says, “so the idea that we’re the first out
of the box isn’t a bad thing. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go on to something
else. This knowledge has to be disbursed. No one knows all the answers,
yet we’re finding out that around the world people are working on these
things. A lot of the problems have already been solved.”
Innovators have been working in isolation, he says. When he
began talking publicly about what was going on at LACCD, he began
receiving phone calls and visits from people who “looked like mad
scientists. One guy showed me a little tiny light that’s not an LED. It’s
something else, uses 2 ˝ watts and produces 100 watts of light. Amazing!”
There are the buildings, and then there is what goes into the buildings –
things like furniture and carpets. These are another source of bold
experimentation at LACCD, which developed its own specs and requirements
for procuring them. With a $100 million allocated for furniture alone,
the District put out a bulk bid that called for every piece to be
sustainable, 100 percent recyclable. “We needed vendors to change their
processes, to, for example, take the chrome out of furniture,” said
Eisenberg. When the bid first came out only two manufacturers qualified;
today several others have joined them.
The size of the LACCD project is sufficient to inspire change among
manufacturers. The District standard for carpeting was that it would have to
last 30 years. The standard asked for 40 percent recycled material in the carpet
itself, not just the backing, which is where most recycled material has
been put. Two manufacturers competed and both were ready to adapt their
operations to meet the standard. One of them, Tandus, won the low bid and
did change their factory. The product they produce has backing that is 100
percent recycled material and a face that is 40 percent recycled. Beyond
this, the new product itself is 100 percent recyclable. The price? Less
than $15 a yard, about half the market price for a comparable product. To
expand access to these new sustainable products, the District made the
furniture and carpet contracts “piggybackable,” meaning that any public
entity can order under these contracts and get the same prices and
quality.
Campuses as Learning Opportunities
The events at LACCD offer a powerful example of the fact that an
energy revolution is already unfolding, one in which grid-based power
delivery will become distributed energy generation, or onsite energy
production. This transformation is forcing a rethinking and a retooling of
the workforce. “You’ll need someone who can install the panels, the
suitcase batteries, to help you do the maintenance,” says Eisenberg.
“We’re going to teach people how to do that.”
LACCD’s commitment to implementing cutting edge technologies in its
building program offers students a unique opportunity to study in a
“living laboratory,” and creates opportunities for valuable hands-on
experiences to be incorporated into its green jobs curriculum.
The function that community colleges serve is not well understood, says
Eisenberg. The typical student is 28 years old, has a family and children
and has decided to do something different with his or her life. “We
provide them with an affordable way to do that. I‘ve heard the stories,
the things they’ve been through touch your heart. Now they have an
opportunity for a new life.
“There’s a whole new range of jobs,” he continues, “and we need to teach
people how to do them. The remarkable work we’re doing with sustainability
means that we can do things for fundamental change locally, and they
carry forward to r the state and even nationally and internationally.
There’s so much visibility that we have a chance to do things others
wouldn’t do in a million years.”
To Dr. Clark, the most powerful aspect of the work may be the chance to
demonstrate that it’s possible to have plenty of energy and power that is
environmentally friendly and non-polluting. “It’s good for our society,
for our health and for our planet,” he says.
“It’s also cost effective," he adds. With the price of oil at over $100
per barrel, we’re talking about taking control over energy costs. And even
more significantly, we won’t have to go to war over the wind or the sun.”
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