Dartmouth College is investing $500M to become a sustainability leader. Will others follow?

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In April, Dartmouth College announced an eye-catching figure to make its campus more sustainable, an investment amounting to half a billion dollars

How the Ivy League university plans to actually lessen its impact on the planet is considerably less eye-catching. In fact, few around campus might have a chance to physically see the changes. 

That’s because much of the spending will go into an overhaul of the campus’s facility heating infrastructure, moving it from a steam-based to a hot-water system.

“Hot water doesn’t seem sexy or innovative,” said Josh Keniston, senior vice president of capital planning and campus operations at Dartmouth, who’s overseeing the institution’s energy transition. “It actually is a much more flexible technology than steam.”

The hot-water system Dartmouth is building out includes numerous distribution points, including a thousand underground bore holes — meaning the infrastructure is literally unseen. 

The distributed nature of the system also doesn’t require centralized heating infrastructure. Instead, the college can use a variety of heating methods, such as electric heat pumps and solar powered heat pumps. It can even use water heated up in the New England summers and stored underground until winter, when it’s needed. All that allows for multiple approaches on energy.

The transition to the hot-water system — which replaces aging infrastructure already in need of an overhaul — means a 20% gain in efficiency. 

“You lose so much energy when you’re distributing via steam,” Keniston said. And that energy savings can help offset the investment costs over the years to come. 

The infrastructure revamp is part of an effort to reduce emissions on campus 60% by 2030, and entirely 100% by 2050. It’s all tied in with a broader effort on campus meant to incorporate research, academics and the wider community. 

For fiscal 2022, the institution reported about 58,500 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. It says it is on pace to meet most of its long-term emissions goals, though acknowledges it might not hit its 2025 target of lowering carbon emissions to 38,414 metric tons. 

The $500 million Dartmouth is spending represents roughly a quarter of the institution’s overall capital improvement plan, according to Keniston

Along with the transition to a hot-water system, it includes other energy efficiency measures like improving building enclosures. It also provides funds for adding non-combustion technologies such as geo-exchange boreholes, large-scale heat pumps and solar energy, for electricity as well as hot water generation. 

The spending represents the largest investment focused on sustainability in the institution’s history, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock wrote in an April letter to campus. 

“We acknowledge that our past efforts around campus decarbonization have come up short,” Beilock said in the letter. “Our new, much more aggressive goals are designed to help us lead in campus sustainability — especially in more rural cold-climate locations.”

Where the emissions are: heating, electricity, conferences

Dartmouth is just one college among thousands in the U.S. And it’s a wealthy one, with $1.4 billion in annual revenue and $11.7 billion in assets. Meanwhile, many others are trying just to balance their budget or even stay open. 

While the higher ed sector might represent only a relatively small share of U.S. emissions, it still has roughly 4 million employees and over 18 million students who consume energy and resources. And on many campuses, there are plenty of areas to cut emissions, including at institutions that don’t have the resources of Dartmouth

Perhaps around a quarter of higher ed institutions are leading the way on sustainability efforts, according to Julian Dautremont, director of programs with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

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