Columbia’s uptown campus is making progress on its commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
The Columbia University Medical Center has recently completed the first step of an energy master plan it adopted in 2009 by creating a building management system for the one of the largest buildings on the Washington Heights campus. The plan is to reduce emissions by 30 percent before 2025.
The new system at the William Black Medical Research Building “digitizes the control of electric and heating systems to optimize it for tenant comfort and energy efficiency for, say, when the building might not be occupied,” Rachel Futrell, CUMC associate director of energy management and sustainability, said.
The school is currently in the first phase of the plan, which requires the most significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and therefore necessitates the biggest changes to campus facilities, Futrell said.
Mi Wang, GSAS and a University Senator representing graduate students in natural sciences, said that the lack of efficient heating and cooling systems has been a problem in the past.
“A couple of years ago, when students met with building management, they were complaining because the building heat doesn’t come with a thermostat,” Wang said. This forced students to open the window when the heat was running too high and waste energy. “It reveals a lot of inefficiency,” she said.
In 2010, CUMC put together three different teams to conduct an investigation of their buildings and campus sustainability. Futrell said that the administration was motivated not only by these complaints but also by the PLANYC 2030 initiative, the citywide mission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has specifically challenged hospitals and universities to meet this goal by 2017.
The research teams are assessing purchasing strategies, energy audits, and retrofitting options, allowing CUMC to craft a plan with an overall carbon reduction goal of 17,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2025.
“The CUMC energy plan was developed as a comprehensive roadmap to meet this goal. It should make a substantial impact on reducing the University’s carbon footprint as it is implemented,” Nilda Mesa, assistant vice president of Environmental Stewardship, said in a statement.
Despite these initial advancements, Futrell acknowledged that the real improvements in efficiency will not be seen for a few years. “You don’t really save energy until these projects are complete,” she said, “but now they are showing us the reductions that we need to get, which is really exciting.”
Wang believes that these changes will not only improve energy efficiency, but are also improving students’ lives “in a very significant way.”
“Students up here care a great deal about energy conservation and the green initiative,” she said.
Robert Song, the University Senator for the College of Physicians and Surgeons, agreed.
Most students at the uptown campus “are in favor of making sure that our facilities maintaining energy efficiency,” Song said in an email. “Obviously, as students who pay tuition and utilities expenses every year, we’re also interested in making sure that costs are minimized whenever possible.”
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