Project Team
Student(s)
Katherine Gannon
Environmental Resources Engineering
SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Mentor(s)
College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
College of Earth and Mineral Sciences
Project Video
Project Abstract
As global temperatures rise in response to ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, so does the risk to global infrastructure and industries crucial to humanity. Thus, it is critical that large organizations, like universities, take responsibility for their environmental footprint and influence the necessary changes needed in global society by developing emissions-reduction strategies. Penn State has inventoried its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for two decades, but because of its broad scope, the inventory does not provide unit-level detail that could be applied by colleges to assess and manage their emissions.
Last summer, a GHG inventory for the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) was accomplished by this author as a first step toward informing and influencing the college community to manage and reduce its emissions. As part of the EMS Sustainability Council’s overall effort to reduce the college’s environmental footprint, two initiatives were started this summer: 1) providing accessibility to building-level energy and other utility use data for the purpose of increasing awareness of, and hopefully reductions in, energy and utility use; and 2) considering the impact of EMS purchasing decisions and their associated life-cycle emissions.
At University Park (UP), utility consumption is metered at the building level, and data is collected through the program EnergyCAP. Utilizing EnergyCAP’s built-in dashboard feature, three dashboard templates were built to be embedded into the existing EMS Sustainability website for easy public viewing. The first template includes utility consumption data from all UP buildings while the second features utility consumption only at buildings with EMS spaces. These dashboards include various graphs and tables that rank building utility consumption over a set time frame and allows users to display a single building’s data within the same dashboard using a search capability. Archived data within EnergyCAP allows year-to-year trends to be evaluated; this can be analyzed, for example, to determine the success of energy projects over time. The third dashboard gives more specific data for buildings with the greatest EMS presence. Here, updates in real-time allow users to see data from within the hour, which may be a critical component of quickly addressing anomalies sourcing from an inefficient practice or fixture.
The dashboards provide the EMS community with information on utility consumption, which represents ~91% of the college’s carbon footprint based on last summer’s inventory. These emissions fall within Scopes 1&2 emissions classification. Further, the EMS inventory includes information on some Scope 3 emissions, specifically employee commuting and air travel, but neglected to address other Scope 3 emissions like procurement, even though many sources of indirect emissions from higher education institutions lie within this category. Thus, inquiries were made into vendors and types of purchases in EMS on an annual basis to gain a greater understanding of emissions related to the college’s purchase and receipt of goods. While most of the EMS community cannot directly control the sources of energy used in the college, decisions which are made at the university level, they can control the sustainability of goods purchased, used, and consumed by the college to maximize reduction of the EMS environmental footprint.
