Do you need a GHG Reduction Strategy
“Success is 20% skills and 80% strategy. You might know how to succeed, but more importantly, what’s your plan to succeed?” Jim Rohn
Many organizations are beginning to evaluate greenhouse gas emissions and the potential role of reducing these emissions in their broader organization ESG strategy. This aligns with international goals such as the Paris Climate Accord and is quickly becoming a differentiator between those organizations that have set emission reduction goals and those that have not. However, before merely setting carbon footprint reduction targets, it is important to understand the overall concept of GHG emissions. This is a holistic approach and is an important component of reducing the impact of the built environment. Still, it requires an understanding of the causation factors and a plan to disrupt those causation factors.
To develop a strategy, we need first to understand some basics, like what CO2 is. I know we all breathe CO2; it is an essential component of life. At its most basic level, CO2 is a molecule made up of one Carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. It is created during the fermentation or combustion of carbon substances such as wood, sugar, and fossil fuels. When Carbon Dioxide is created, it is absorbed by our atmosphere, eventually joining the planet’s carbon cycle, which is the process by which carbon atoms travel from earth to atmosphere and eventually back to earth again.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is actually a tiny percentage of the total gasses that make up our atmosphere, only making of roughly .04 percent. However, since 1800, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising rapidly. In fact, before this period of time, atmospheric levels have never exceeded 300 parts per million, yet today we are over 440 parts per million.
Now you may be saying, wait, you just said CO2 is a natural process, and it is essential to life. In fact, we exhale it with every breath. So isn’t this part of a natural cycle. Interestingly, we can actually tell from the chemical signature of CO2 where it actually came from. CO2 that originates from fossil fuels contains a unique isotopic footprint. The CO2 that our plants absorb is carbon-12; this is the same CO2 that we exhale, and it is lighter in weight and thus more easily used in photosynthesis. Volcanic emissions are heavier and can be observed as carbon-13, while radioactive carbon is known as carbon-14. When climate scientists examine the CO2 in our atmosphere, they are observing carbon dioxide that comes from terrestrial plants (because they are depleted in "heavy" carbon-13), but which is so old that any carbon-14 it once contained has decayed to non-detectable levels and is capable of creating a pulse of carbon dioxide that is larger and faster than anything that’s occurred in at least the past million years. Only fossil fuels meet all those criteria.
In layman's terms, this means we are not guessing where the CO2 in our atmosphere originates. It has left behind a fingerprint that allows us to trace it to its origin, and that origin is fossil fuels.
As we consider what is left to that rise in fossil fuel origin CO2, we look back to when this increase in concentration began, the 1800s, which was also the industrial revolution. As you start to think about it, it makes sense as the industrial revolution brought many advances, and with those advances came an increased need for energy. More energy means more fuels, for that energy is needed. Before this period, wood was the primary energy source, but as energy demands increased, demand outpaced supply, and our primary energy source switched to coal. As we transitioned to this new energy source, technology changes also increased, providing us faster transportation, improved means of production, and the need to even more fuel. Along with energy and technology advances, our global population also increased, driving additional energy demand. If you can imagine a snowball rolling down a hill, the need for energy grew larger with each passing year.
With more people and industry, the built environment also expanded. Buildings got taller, bigger, and required more and more energy. The larger the structure, the stronger the materials need to be to construct that building. More robust materials meant more steel and more concrete and other building materials such as glass, insulation, and flooring.
If your starting to see a pattern develop, then you are catching on. The more people and the more advance the technology, the more energy that needs to be created. The more built space that has to be made for those people and for the processes that are demanded by those people. It is an insatiable appetite for more. So how does that work exactly? Those more substantial materials - concrete, steel, glass, etc. require energy to create. In some cases, very intense heat is needed during manufacturing. Portland cement, for example, is the component of concrete that makes the paste that binds together the aggregate requires large amounts of heat to create. The manufacturing process is actually one of the most carbon-intensive manufacturing processes in existence, yielding upwards of 1,000 lbs. of Carbon Dioxide for every ton of finished material, making concrete responsible for 8% of all global emissions.
If you notice, we haven’t even talked about operating the building yet, we are simply talking about the amount of embodied carbon in the construction process. Now, lets add to that building carpet and finishes, all of which have to transport to the site, installed, and many of which require fossil fuels in their manufacturing process as well. Even if the material itself doesn’t include carbon-based materials, chances are it is made in a building that uses electricity so there still remains some embodied carbon in its manufacture.
In that fictional building we just constructed and have now received our certificate of occupancy, we will also have operational impacts such as heating, air conditioning, lighting, and various plug loads. Each of these elements is needed for occupant comfort and for the building to function.
Let’s dive into an example of a conference room in a leasing office. As we all just saw the importance of video conferencing over the past 18 months, we will add a TV with a video camera to that conference room. That TV gets plugged in and requires electricity to operate. In addition to the TV, there is heating and cooling, ventilation, lighting, and most likely additional plug load in the room.
Whenever that conference room is utilized, it consumes electricity that is most likely delivered via the grid. This means somewhere outside the building; someone is creating energy for that TV and the other items in the room. To make electricity, we “generate it,” and what we use for that “generation” is what we call the generation mix. In other words, this means what was used to make that electricity. In most cases, it is a combination of materials, perhaps coal, some wind energy, or even natural gas.
Once that fuel or generation mix is used to convert energy to electricity, it is sent to our building and ultimately that conference room through the distribution system, which we commonly call “the grid.” The entire process is very inefficient, with losses of energy coming at nearly every point from energy creation to energy delivery. In fact, only about 66% of the energy created ever even makes it to the consumer. Of the 33% that does make it to the consumer, nearly 80% is wasted by the end-user through inefficiency. This “leakage” occurs every minute of every hour, every day, of every year. When calculated, this rate of leakage, if only 1 cu. ft. per hour produces a loss of 8,760 cu. ft. in a year. (Municipal and County Engineering, Vol LXI, No 5, page 176).
While we have certainly made technological advances that have helped improve efficiency, we have not overcome the extreme inefficiency of the grid system. To make matters worse, we also continue to demand more and more energy. From 1990 to 2015, despite the emergence of LED lighting, which greatly reduced the amount of energy needed for lighting, we saw CO2 emissions related to the operation of buildings increase, including an alarming 20.4% increase from residential buildings. Much of those emissions are related to indirect (Scope 2) emissions that result from electricity being produced offsite for delivery through “the grid” to power the building. (source)
That increase in electrical demand is positive in the sense that energy derived from electricity can originate from non-carbon-based fuel, for example, solar or wind. It does, however, also provide a cautionary tale that our overall energy demand may be increasing, not decreasing. In an era that has seen large-scale LED lighting retrofits, it causes one to wonder. If lighting represented roughly 25-30% of the building energy consumption, and after an LED retrofit, that consumption from lighting went down - what replaced it?
The area that has seen the biggest increase over that same time period is “all other.” While that is very general, it primarily represents plug load - things plugged into an outlet. This is the iPhone charger, the computer, the TV, etc. An NRDC 2015 report attempted to look deeper into the “all other” issue and found a large amount of waste related to idle loads. That is, devices plugged in, potentially in a standby state, but not actively being used. It is estimated that this “always-on” load accounts for $19 Billion a year across the United States, requiring 50 large (500-megawatt) power plants to provide the idle load consumption.
Understanding where the carbon intensity is present is fundamental to developing an effective GHG reduction strategy. However, it is not the only step. Equally important is understanding the energy generation source. This is where the strategy of electrification comes into the conversation. Electrification is converting from natural gas to electricity. Electrification can be particularly effective in space heating, water heating, and cooking applications, and we are seeing the practice emerging in new building energy codes.
You may see a pattern emerging - no one step will provide an effective GHG reduction strategy. We can focus on efficiency, we can focus on embodied carbon, we can even focus on reducing natural gas consumption, and we still are not comprehensive enough. We also need to look at the electrical supply itself. Here we can evaluate the opportunity for on-site renewables such as solar and off-site opportunities such as community solar. We also need to look at the grid supply and what our options are in regards to supply. If you are in a deregulated state, this may be easy; you may have the opportunity to simply purchase a cleaner fuel mix with your next supply contract. If you are not in a deregulated electrical supply state, however, you will need to watch what the local utilities are doing and may need to establish a lobbying effort to push the local utility to decarbonize.
(click on picture for more detailed information on utility decarbonization)
You may be thinking, ok, we are finally ready to start discussing strategy… but that would still be premature. We have to discuss organizational boundary, operational boundary, methodology used to develop the GHG inventory, as well as discuss data management. I hope you join me in this series as we pull the covers back on the components that make for an effective and holistic GHG Reduction Strategy.
Until next week, you can help reduce the impact of the built environment by sharing this blog with your peers. Together we can impact the 39% of greenhouse gasses attributed to the built environment. It starts with awareness, and we succeed with teamwork.
Stay well!
Chris Laughman is the ThirtyNine Blog author, a blog dedicated to reducing the impact of the built environment. When not blogging, Chris is helping the real estate industry reduce energy and water impact as the Vice President of Sustainability for Conservice, the Utility Experts. Whether Multifamily, Single Family, Student Housing, Commercial, or Military, we simplify utility billing and expense management by doing it for you. Our insight into your utility consumption provides an opportunity to identify risks. Leveraging innovation and experience, we ignite solutions with real impacts and track performance to ensure the trendline stays laser-focused on the goal. To get there, we must build relationships within our organizations and outside of our organizations building the critical mass needed to truly make a difference. We have before us a tremendous opportunity. Standing shoulder to shoulder, we will get this done. Contact me at claughman@conservice.com for more information.
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