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UC San Diego Carbon Reduction Plan 

San Diego, CA, USA

UC San Diego is a known leader in environmental performance and low carbon operations. The UC Office of the President has made achieving carbon neutrality across scopes 1 and 2 by 2025 a priority for its campuses. This provided the target for the UC San Diego to reset its low carbon course at the start of this project in 2016 and build a framework for achieving carbon neutrality over the next nine years.

A general approach was taken that primarily seeks to directly reduce the University’s carbon emissions and then offset that which remains. The Carbon Reduction Plan that º£½ÇÊÓƵ drafted looked to prevent emissions as much as possible while still meeting the University’s critical research, safety, reliability, resilience, and cost effectiveness requirements.  

Challenge

While it was recognized that carbon offsets and renewable energy credits (RECs) would play a role in meeting the 2025 carbon neutrality goal, it was recommended that their role lessen over time as technology improves. Additionally, only gold standard, California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved certificates and offsets were to be purchased, to ensure quality and compliance. 

Solution

º£½ÇÊÓƵ worked with UC San Diego in developing comprehensive sustainability strategies to map various pathways forward in achieving carbon neutrality and decarbonizing at a campus wide scale. The discovery phase of the project included an assessment of existing conditions and initiatives, including central plant operation, building audits, review of existing campus chilled water, hot water and power use data and stakeholder meetings. This concluded with an update of the business-as-usual carbon baseline scenario considering existing programs and development. 

The project’s Analysis phase included development of the carbon pathways and carbon savings analysis. Five scenarios were modeled including: 

• Energy efficiency and Carbon Offsets 

• Energy efficiency and Biogas 

• Energy efficiency and Biomass CHP 

• Energy efficiency and Electrification of the Central Plant 

• Energy efficiency and Diversification of Power Generation 

The savings were categorized across buildings, campus supply, campus generation, strategic purchases (RECs and Offsets), fleet vehicles and a review of carbon sequestration viability. In addition to these strategies, the required behavioral change and institutional change were considered required for a successful plan. 

Value

Our approach combined the practical steps needed on energy efficiency against innovation at the building and campus scale to reduce energy and carbon emissions – including the opportunity from carbon sequestration. 

The final phase of the project included evaluation of the various pathways and stakeholder engagement for decision making. Ultimately, with technology available at the time, low carbon fuels or electrification coupled with green power were the big moves to significant carbon reductions exceeding 90%.  

Carbon sequestration was recommended for ongoing evaluation as technology improvements and cost reductions continue to make this a more viable carbon pathway for central plants that could retain campus resilience while achieving Scope 1 carbon reductions.  

Key additional lessons learnt were on alignment of strategies to asset renewals and on retaining campus resilience – a key challenge for a large central plant. The plan was ahead of its time in 2016 – and this project laid the foundation for our carbon action planning work and our approach within the public and private sector and higher education.