Guelph Students for Environmental Change

Students seek energy retrofit for campus

By Brian Whitwham, published in the Guelph Mercury, Tuesday, January 25th 2005

Nathan Denette, Guelph Mercury

University of Guelph student Fraser Thomson, a member of Guelph Students for Environmental Change, the renewable energy group on campus, stands under efficient lighting in the crop sciences building, the only facility on campus that is energy retrofitted.

A University of Guelph student group says the administration isn’t moving quickly on an innovative and economically sound way to cut pollution on campus.

Fraser Thomson, of Guelph Students for Environmental Change, said the group has been pressuring the university for more than a year to do an energy retrofit on campus.

“The university is supposed to be the innovator in society but that’s not happening,” Thomson said. “This isn’t that radical of an initiative. Corporations have done this. If it works for corporations, surely it could work for the university.”

Schools across Canada and the U.S. have already done energy retrofits that are based on finding more energy-efficient lighting, heating and cooling systems on campus, Thomson said.

The University of Guelph had an energy audit done in 2003 by a Toronto company that does retrofitting and it guaranteed the university could see savings of $1.6 million per year, he said.

The school then had its crop-science building retrofitted over the summer but since then, no actions have been taken, Thomson said.

“They’ve done small little things,” he said. “That’s good but if you look at the environment as a priority, we’re falling behind other institutions.”

Nancy Sullivan, vice-president of finance and administration, said a full-campus retrofit would cost about $10.6 million and the university isn’t in a position to spend that right now.

“Ten point six million is a lot of money for any organization,” Sullivan said. “The payback is over 10 years. So energy savings in the meantime would have to go to paying off the initial costs.

“And the real challenge for the institution is we have a number of high-priority deferred maintenance issues.”

But she said the university has been active in its energy-saving practises. The retrofit pilot project cost more than $1 million and the school has recently installed a “stack heat recovery system” at its central utilities plant that will heat a 40,000 square-foot extension being added to the arts building.

“We can now, as a result of that project, heat the building at no extra cost or impact on the environment,” Sullivan said.

“We have to determine what steps in our whole energy study we’ll implement.

“We’ve taken a progressive approach where we can make changes that have a relatively immediate pay back.”

Thomson said taking an incremental approach doesn’t make sense when the benefits to an energy retrofit are clear. He said the energy study predicted a reduction of 5,780 tonnes of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, emitted on campus and an energy saving of 9,350,880 kilowatt hours per year.

“From an environmental perspective, doing it all at once instead of over several years, cuts our emissions down immediately,” Thomson said. “Secondly, there’s the whole uncertainty about rising electricity costs and natural gas prices.

“If we do this retrofit, those won’t affect us as much.”

Mike Ferley, an energy advocate at the University of Manitoba, is responsible for finding cost-efficient ways to use energy on campus. He said there was a complete retrofit done at his school from 1997 until 2000 at a cost of $13.1 million.

“We projected our savings at $2 million annually,” Ferley said. “We’ve never under-performed. We’ve always exceeded our expectations. Last year, we saved over 2.5 million.”

“And you still save a pile of energy and a pile of greenhouse gases.”

If it’s working at other universities, it helps the environment and it helps the bottom line, Thomson said. The University of Guelph should bite the bullet and make the investment, he said.

“If we don’t do it, our energy costs will go up anyway no matter what,” Thomson said. “If they don’t do it all at once, they’re wasting time and energy while they’re delaying.”