Stars for sustainability
CSU gains stellar reputation as it seeks carbon neutrality by 2040
July 17, 2023
MEADOWLARKS SANG and a summer breeze stirred the air as Stacey Baumgarn studied a solar array covering 30 acres at the CSU Foothills Campus on the western edge of Fort Collins.
“We’re standing next to a power plant,” said Baumgarn, campus energy coordinator for Colorado State University.
This sweeping field of solar panels is a significant part of CSU’s renewable energy initiative. The array and more than 40 smaller solar installations, which dot the tops of buildings on the Main Campus and at outlying facilities, annually produce nearly 17 million kilowatt hours of electricity. That’s enough to fulfill about 10 percent of the university’s total annual electricity needs.
The university’s solar program – along with energy conservation and partnerships with area utilities – puts CSU on track to fulfill its goal of using electricity from 100 percent renewable resources by 2030. Even more, the program is part of a broader goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2040.
These goals are driven by the CSU Climate Action Plan, and their related initiatives have helped the university gain a stellar national reputation for sustainability practices and environmental stewardship.
Since 2015, CSU has earned the highest ratings possible from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, becoming the first university in the world to earn four platinum ratings in a row. That makes CSU a standout among nearly 600 institutions assessed worldwide. The university’s most recent platinum rating was announced early this year as part of the association’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, known as STARS.
The top-tier STARS ratings account for Colorado State’s green operations, such as solar energy production, and for campus initiatives including sustainability research, energy-efficient building design, student activities, food security efforts, alternative transportation, and education that infuses many academic and outreach programs.
“It’s so important for us to demonstrate leadership and do our part,” Baumgarn said. “As an educational institution, we have a particularly important role to play in walking the talk and demonstrating what can be done with sustainability. We can be great leaders in the ways we choose to be stewards of our resources and reduce our environmental impacts.”
Near the solar field, there’s another notable CSU sustainability operation: the university composting facility. While it does not match the impact of the university’s renewable energy initiative, the composting operation is highly visible – and often serves as a doorway inviting students and community members to learn more about sustainability and to practice conservation in their daily lives, Baumgarn said.
Each day of the academic year, the composting operation accepts about 15,000 pounds of solid waste from CSU. This includes food scraps from campus dining facilities, paper towel waste from campus restrooms, landscaping debris, and heaps of straw and manure from the university’s horse facilities.
Some of this solid waste goes into a piece of equipment known as Oscar, named for the grouchy green Sesame Street character. (As you might recall, Oscar loves trash!) Here, waste is mixed and turned over the course of three weeks and is transformed into compost used as a rich soil amendment across campus. Additionally, bagged compost is sold to the public at the CSU Surplus Property building. A second method at the composting facility cures waste in more traditional piles, called windrows, for up to a year before it is used or sold.
“It’s a beautiful product,” said Gilbert Mojica, head of operations, as he grabbed a handful of finished compost. “It’s satisfying to bring CSU composting to this scale and to divert all this waste from the landfill.”
This fall, the composting program will expand to accept waste from food court vendors in CSU’s Lory Student Center. That makes the CSU composting operation one of the largest university enterprises of its kind, said Tonie Miyamoto, who serves as co-chair of the President’s Sustainability Commission, the CSU group that helps spearhead and track sustainability initiatives.
One of the university’s biggest sustainability accomplishments is not even visible – it’s mostly underground. Called Moby GeoX, it is a geoexchange system that provides heating and cooling for CSU’s Moby Arena complex. The arena hosts basketball and volleyball games, houses athletics training facilities, and accommodates large university events, such as commencement.
Moby GeoX is the largest geoexchange system in Colorado and one of the largest in the West. It cost $20 million and has received industry accolades for design. The system comprises more than 340 well holes, each bored 550 feet deep, and some 70 miles of piping to circulate water – all hidden under recreation fields on the south side of Moby Arena.
The system takes advantage of the Earth’s stable underground temperature, which registers at about 50 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. During summertime, Moby GeoX uses equipment to capture and reject heat from building air, transferring it to water circulating through the geoexchange system; as water flows through a closed loop of buried pipes, it cools to the underground temperature and travels back to the building; here, equipment transfers the cool temperature to indoor air as it blows through the building. During wintertime, the function reverses – the system captures thermal energy from water flowing underground and uses it to help warm the building. In both cases, the geoexchange system gets indoor temperatures partway to preferred levels; upgraded heating and cooling equipment supplements the system to complete the job.
The result: CSU has reduced energy consumption at the Moby complex by about 50 percent. That’s because the renewable energy system replaces cooling from old chillers and more energy-intensive heat generated by natural gas at CSU’s steam distribution plant. Indeed, Moby GeoX is so efficient that it could be expanded to heat and cool nearby facilities.
Such projects represent key strides in reducing Colorado State’s overall greenhouse gas inventory, which amounts to the equivalent of nearly 180,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted annually. Baumgarn carries a pie chart with him to illustrate the sources. The biggest contributors to CSU’s carbon footprint – forming the largest pieces of Baumgarn’s pie chart – are electricity from nonrenewable resources and natural gas. So, it is not surprising that the university’s high-impact solar and geoexchange projects are designed to shrink the two largest pieces of the pie.
And if the university can reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2040, the entire pie representing CSU’s greenhouse gas inventory will go “poof.”
“Our work,” Baumgarn noted, “is to make this pie go away.”
Photos: Solar arrays atop CSU buildings help fulfill about 10 percent of the university’s electricity needs; recreation fields south of Moby Arena are home to a huge, underground renewable energy system. Photography: Colorado State University.
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