CU Boulder’s new $43M energy plant is not green enough for its faculty experts (2024)

When it comes to pitching a new, green-friendly energy plant promising progress for a high-profile institution, the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus can be a tough crowd.

The Boulder administration says its $43 million rebuild of the West District heating, cooling and electrical plant will be more reliable, pump out less nitrogen oxide and provide an affordable bridge to looming, ultra-green technology. The west district provides heating and cooling to the main campus and backup electrical power to the main and East campuses.

But when you ask for campuswide advice at CU, you’re getting critiqued by Ph.D.s as comfortable with physics and chemistry as they are with exercising the First Amendment.

From a university that claims to be dedicated to “a policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to my mind, it’s just an incredibly stupid decision, from the perspective of both money and the environment,” said law professor Mark Squillace, one of the leaders of a faculty, staff and student review requested by the administration.

And then, Squillace adds, top officials have refused to entertain any of the expert suggestions.

“It just is a shocking display of unwillingness to engage in shared governance,” Squillace said.

The review from the Climate Action Shared Governance Team dented the administration’s energy plan for replacing fossil-fueled gas turbines with more efficient models. The advisory group said federal climate change tax credits might not come through to reduce the CU cost, and that the campus was committing long-term money when green power breakthroughs are just on the horizon. What officials call “resiliency” is really just building overcapacity that doesn’t solve CU’s pollution problems, Squillace said.

The primary alternatives suggested were to replace and upgrade steam boilers instead of buying new natural gas-fueled turbines, and quickening the restart times for backup power. The new turbines would be cogenerators, which produce steam for heat and electrical power at the same time. The advisory group said cogeneration is an unnecessary producer of greenhouse gas emissions, and CU would be better off buying power from the rapidly-greening Xcel Energy grid.

“It seemed like we were just totally ignored. Why did we bother?” he said.

The Boulder campus is going ahead with the plan to overhaul the West District energy plant, which provides steam heat throughout dozens of buildings and serves as a largely backup electrical supply to protect key functions and research experiments from outages on the Xcel Energy grid. New gas turbines are on order and could be installed by the end of the year.

Campus officials say they welcomed and considered the climate action committee’s report, and ended up in respectful disagreement.

CU Boulder chief operating officer Patrick O’Rourke said the differences of expert opinion came down to a handful of items:

• CU operations values resiliency and redundancy more in its assessments than the faculty-led group, and therefore gives more weight to options that assure stable power supply during outages or in rapid growth periods for CU campus needs. New turbines win out in that comparison.

• Projected over the long term, the committee’s alternative did not provide significant savings over the chosen CU plan.

• The CU overhaul was prompted in part by new requirements from Colorado’s Air Pollution Control Division, which is combating both the fossil fuel-driven contributors to toxic ground ozone and Colorado’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. The new turbines will come with emissions control equipment that cut the west plant’s nitrogen oxide emissions by 50%.

• CU officials calculated the extra greenhouse gas savings from the faculty’s preferred alternative were only about 5% above what the chosen plan would accomplish. While the CU community, including the administration, is very serious about achieving greenhouse gas and other pollution reduction goals, the difference was not enough to outweigh the other drawbacks of the alternative plan.

• The alternative plan calls into question how much in federal energy efficiency tax credits CU will win in order to help offset project costs. CU officials are adamant they will qualify for $5 million to $8 million in credits for the new turbines and other upgrades, and that’s one reason the rebuild is moving forward now. “We did not want to have that sitting on the table by not having the order placed in time for us to meet that” credit deadline, O’Rourke said.

The advisory group had only three weeks to complete their highly technical review this spring, Squillace said. Some of the differences in the proposals come down to projections of CU needs — the advisory group does not believe the Boulder campus will be bumping up against its capacity for producing energy, or its pollution control requirements, if growth is estimated realistically, Squillace said.

The advisory group asked to meet with Chancellor Justin Schwartz after he arrived July 1, to explain their report and seek another review of the decision. Squillace said they were denied a meeting.

O’Rourke said the Schwartz did take committee’s objections seriously. As a result, CU has decided to forego its usual practice of applying tax credits from the project to any other general project on its to-do lists. Instead, Schwartz has directed that the energy plant tax credits go specifically to the campus Climate Action Plan to pay for greenhouse gas goals and similar projects, O’Rourke said.

He considers it a predictable dispute over equally laudable priorities. “I have to make sure that the campus is protected, and I understand that there are folks who may weigh the calculus differently than I do,” O’Rourke said.

CU Boulder is committed, he added, to longer-term energy solutions that could cut out fossil fuels altogether and fulfill the goals of Boulder County’s many climate change pioneers. The campus is studying and contemplating test drilling for geothermal sources that could provide the energy for demanding steam-heat needs across so many buildings. CU Boulder also recently announced it was purchasing the power credits from a 5MW solar farm that private Pivot Energy will build in Weld County, to offset its electrical grid needs.

The administration will do at least one thing differently next time it’s preparing for a big energy upgrade, O’Rourke said.

“We really engaged our faculty on the back end,” after the west energy project had already gone to the Board of Regents, he said. In the future, he said, “we can start engaging our faculty earlier.”