Decarbonizing a sprawling university system

As Chief of Energy, Sustainability, and Transportation at the Chancellor’s Office of California State University, Lindsey Rowell is charged with developing and implementing a plan to decarbonize every aspect of the school system, on all 23 campuses, with minimal use of offsets, by 2045. In this episode, she lays out what it will take to tackle this ambitious goal.

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David Roberts

Contemplate, if you will, the California State University system. It is the largest public-university system in the country — by some accounts, the largest in the world — with more than a half-million students and some 55,000 faculty and staff, spread across a sprawling network of 23 campuses, from the top of the state to the bottom.

What if I told you that it was your job to decarbonize that entire system — the buildings, the energy infrastructure, the transportation, the food, the construction materials, all of it — and you had just over 20 years to do it. Would you panic? Possibly short circuit? I'm pretty sure I would.

As it happens, though, that is someone's job. Her name is Lindsey Rowell and she is the Chief of Energy, Sustainability, and Transportation at the Chancellor’s Office. She is on the hook for developing and implementing a plan to make the entire CSU system carbon neutral by 2045, with minimal use of offsets.

You might think, to accomplish something so vast, she would have a team of dozens and a budget of billions. But this is a public university system, so of course she doesn't — instead it's duct tape, baling wire, and ingenuity. I had a great time talking with her about how to approach this unwieldy project. I think you will find her pragmatism and good humor refreshing.

Every policy or regulation ultimately must be implemented by someone on the ground. This is what that looks like.

All right then. Lindsey Rowell, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Lindsey Rowell

Thank you so much for having me.

David Roberts

This is really interesting, a lot of really interesting stuff here — I have a million questions to get through to ask you. But for starters, why don't you just tell us a little bit about the California State University system, which is different than the University of California system. Just getting that right up front.

Lindsey Rowell

Let's get that out of the way. We are so different. Sure thing. So, California State University system, whether you realize it or not, you probably know it. We are the largest public university system in the country, by some metrics in the world, depending on who you ask on which day. So we have 23 campuses in the system spread across the state, from the very tippy top up in Humboldt and down to the very, very bottom of the state in San Diego. So we cover the entire space in California, and we've been educating students for about 150 years.

So we have really old universities. We also have a few satellite locations that offer specialty coursework in nursing or business. And we educate about half a million students with about 55,000 faculty and staff. So we are a huge, hug organization, and the schools, probably people are most familiar with without realizing that they are CSU schools, are the California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo — it's one that a lot of folks don't realize as part of our system. And we have three Cal Polys now, Humboldt is a Cal Poly and Cal Poly Pomona, and then, of course, San Diego State is one of our biggest.

San Diego, Fullerton, and Long Beach are three of our biggest institutions in Southern California. Reason?

David Roberts

Are they all four-year undergrad colleges, or are there some vocational stuff or community colleges?

Lindsey Rowell

So no community colleges. The community college system is a separate but friendly sister organization, complete state organization. And the CSU is a four-year institution and graduate program. So we have masters, and we do have educational doctorate programs at a few of the campuses. So four-plus years.

David Roberts

So 23 campuses?

Lindsey Rowell

Yes.

David Roberts

Across the state. That's a lot. So tell us, then, what laws you are like — what are your mandated goals here? And are they mandated by the state of California, or does CSU have its own separate goals, or are these all just sort of state goals that you're implementing?

Lindsey Rowell

So, without getting too boring into the legislative dynamic of the CSU, we're sort of a quasi-state agency. So what that usually means is that most regulatory and legislative mandates are applicable to us where we're mentioned specifically. Part of that is due to the fact that we are called out specifically in the government code. So we are our own authority having jurisdiction, if you want a technical term, and then we are self support — a portion of our work is self support through student tuition and endowments and so forth. So what that means is the CSU often sets more ambitious goals.

I cannot think of anything off the top of my head where we are not, at the very least, meeting California's goals. As California gets more robust in its challenges towards climate change, I think the gap between California requirements and CSU requirements is closing. But, yes, we align with the state in pretty much everything we do, either by intent or by statute.

David Roberts

The broad framework I've been thinking about this in know, I think a lot about policy and laws and politics and getting laws passed, but every law that passes, someone has to do it, right? Someone has to implement it. And so I've just been giving a lot of thought to, who are the people out on the front lines implementing these things? So part of why I'm asking is, what happens if you don't meet them. Are these self imposed goals where if you don't meet them, for whatever reason, you're just like, "Ah, we swung and missed. Bummer." Or is there some legal penalty if you don't reach them?

Like, what happens if you don't meet these goals?

Lindsey Rowell

That's a fun question because my first answer is the world ends. That's what happens. So government, as you know, is generally a carrot sort of organization, not a stick organization. I mean, punitive response to not meeting legislation is usually reserved for the private sector. And government agencies are, you know, sort of pressured to respond to these mandates, but without, you know, punitive expectations if they don't make them. That said, though, and I'm going to offer a little prediction — this is Lindsey Rowell's prediction, this is not the CSU's prediction, disclaimer — that because the intensity of the climate crisis just ever increases. And it's funny that we're doing this today, David, because I just saw all the news of the massive waves in hitting the California coastline.

I don't think I've ever seen that in my lifetime due to Pacific storms. And so what I predict is going to happen is there's going to be this sort of the incentive approach, right, where there's programs to support government agencies meeting these standards and goals, and then there'll start to be some hand slapping, maybe there will be some tightening of the purse strings with regard to funding that comes our way. And then I do think eventually there will be punitive damages in the form of carbon taxes or more direct funding cut offs.

David Roberts

Right. So sticks will show up eventually.

Lindsey Rowell

I think they've got to. I mean, I think at some point you can't rely on folks to do this work voluntarily. And I think governments often have to choose between the two pennies that they have to rub together, as one of my staff likes to say, which I think is a great metaphor.

David Roberts

Well, actually, wait, we have to rewind because we skipped what the goals actually are, right. CSU imposes its own goals, but what is the goal? I forgot to get that on record.

Lindsey Rowell

That's actually a great one. We should talk about that. So, the CSU, we have a new sustainability policy. And I say new. Actually, I'm thinking that it's not so new anymore. So we passed a new sustainability policy right after I came back to the CSU. So this is January of 2022. And the new sustainability policy, the overarching goal, is carbon neutrality by 2045.

David Roberts

And is that the same as the state?

Lindsey Rowell

Yes, that's the same goal as the state. Now, campuses have individual goals that might be more aggressive. Some are targeting as early as 2030, which is terrifying, but great to see that ambition out there. So that's the overarching goal. But within that, mostly what we've done is aligned with the AASHE STARS program, if you're not familiar. AASHE is the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and they have a tracking system, and it sort of captures everything with regard to sustainability across the board, in curriculum, in student basic needs, in diversity, equity, inclusion.

So we've sort of aligned our policy to tackle all of those overarching umbrella criteria and then the various credits underneath those. So we have a lot of goals, but the overarching one that is sort of the point to it all is this carbon neutrality by 2045 as a system.

David Roberts

And what's your job? You have to do that.

Lindsey Rowell

Explaining that to my mother for like 15 years, we just had Christmas: "What do you do for a living?" Basically, our role at the chancellor's office is to sort of advise and facilitate and implement these goals through policy, through programs. So we do a lot of program development and more recently, a lot more advocacy. So you were talking about your interest in policy and legislation. We have gotten very heavily involved on the state and federal legislative side, trying to express the need that the CSU has to inform the powers that be of the group of individuals that we serve, which is, generally speaking, disadvantaged communities, underrepresented minorities, first-generation college students.

So, as we sort of pursue all of this, our jobs kind of touch everything. We also do broad-scale procurement. We do direct access energy procurement for 14 of the campuses, meaning we buy energy on the wholesale market, then transmission and distribution to the utilities, and then bundled service for the rest of the campuses. So we have all of that. We do climate action planning for the campuses, water conservation, sustainable procurement, waste management, sustainable foods.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, this is the point of all this setup, is to get this in readers' minds, is that you are sitting in your office having to think about how to get 23 campuses, physical campuses across the state, to carbon neutrality by 2045.

Lindsey Rowell

Right.

David Roberts

And when I start thinking about that —

Lindsey Rowell

It gives you anxiety?

David Roberts

— it causes a pain behind my right eye. My hands start to shake. To me, that's just like a huge — maybe you've grown accustomed to it over time, but to me, it just seems like such a huge, sprawling thing. It kind of makes my brain short circuit.

Lindsey Rowell

It does that to us. We spend a lot of time sort of mentally advocating for each other, just going, "We can do this. We can do this. We got to just fly forward and it's eating the elephant just one bite at a time."

David Roberts

Yeah, no kidding. The first thing I wanted to ask is just, this seems like, among other things, it's going to take a lot of resources. It's going to take a lot of money to do this. So I was just like, what is your budget? Do you have the budget to achieve this?

Lindsey Rowell

To all legislators and decision-makers listening, we do not. So we have about a $7 billion deferred maintenance backlog.

David Roberts

Oh, goodness.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah. And that's not, "woe is us", sort of — that's not that kind of a comment because the UC and the community colleges of the state at large, this is something we deal with. They're chronically underfunded organizations, as government organizations tend to be. I mean, when we talk about the numbers needed for this type of work, especially decarbonization, just electrification. So let's just talk about electrification plans. The numbers aren't even real numbers, David. They're not numbers that you and I — and we hear them. We hear Jeff Bezos has $65 trillion or whatever. We know that's a figure. But when someone says to you, "Oh, just to electrify your central plant, that serves a campus that occupies, I don't know, let's say, 4 million square feet, is going to cost you, for starters, $350 million for the engineering and the basic equipment change out."

So that doesn't include things like switching everything over to the proper coils that can take the lower temperature hot water to circulate to buildings. That doesn't include any of the offsetting renewable energy and all of that that's required to actually get to net zero. That's an insane number. So when you start to think about that across a whole campus, the number is probably closer to 500 million, a billion per campus and then 23 campuses.

David Roberts

Yeah, it adds right up.

Lindsey Rowell

Huge numbers. They're huge numbers.

David Roberts

Yeah. So I guess that's kind of where I want to start before getting into the details. Just like, how am I not to conclude that this is just impossible what they're asking you to do? The scale of what they're asking you to do with the money you have available to do it, how do you get around that basic —

Lindsey Rowell

Let me give you some of my —

David Roberts

Coping strategies?

Lindsey Rowell

I was going to say my coping strategies, the little things I hang on to as signs of progress. First of all, so for the CSU, we have managed to keep our energy use level over the past almost two decades, despite adding thousands and thousands of square feet. So we're good at energy efficiency, and we've managed to do it with no direct — we have no direct budget assigned for that kind of work. So this is usually nickel and diming an operational budget. This is capturing incentives through utility programs or federal grant programs.

So we do a lot of sort of little things where we chip away at the problem, and that actually is tremendously effective. One of our campuses, one of our energy managers, his name is Kenny Seeton, and I can take his name in vain because we're good friends and he's been around for as long as I have in the CSU. And one of the things he does so well is he'll do things like he'll have $1,000 left on his purchasing, his pro card, at the end of the month, and he'll buy a bunch of lamps or he'll buy a bunch of meters and he'll just keep them in his office until he's got 100 of them. And then he'll rally his team and be like "All right, guys, this weekend we're going to go through and we're going to install all of these."

He'll probably be the first campus to meet the net zero goals, and he's done it all without a dedicated energy budget.

David Roberts

Amazing.

Lindsey Rowell

So, the answer to your question is so fluid. I think the federal government is finally starting to put some real money behind these efforts.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was going to ask, like, IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, actually just showering money down on everything. Are you going to be able to harvest some of that?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, we're really, really trying. So that's a big part of our advocacy program. We've kind of got a two-path, two-pronged approach. One is sort of short term, what can we capture from the Inflation Reduction Act? Which includes stuff that we're kind of already doing, centered around investment tax credits for renewable energy. It also includes the energy efficiency tax credits, things like that, that have traditionally not — we've had to capture through third-party developers. The difficulty, and this is the second prong, the sort of longer-term approach in making legislators understand what it's like to have this money on the ground is a couple of things.

One, we don't have the upfront cash for this type of work. So when a campus has to make a decision, when they say, "Oh, 40% of this or 60% even of this renewables project, the solar project that we want to do is going to come back to us." We still have to come up with the $7-$10 million upfront to do the project.

David Roberts

Because you get it back in tax —

Lindsey Rowell

Exactly.

David Roberts

Under taxes. Right.

Lindsey Rowell

And the problem that we have with that is that that money takes away from something else. And every time I sort of bring this question up with folks, let's just say "the folks," the question is always sort of like, "Well, why don't you have money?" The question is always like, "Well, why don't you just take some money from somewhere else?" It's like, no, you don't understand. That's like saying, "I have $0 in my checking account, write a check, and then —" it doesn't work like that.

David Roberts

Haven't some of the tax credits been made direct pay?

Lindsey Rowell

They are, but they're still reimbursable. And so the issue with that upfront capital means that for us, it's typically not that much more advantageous for us to own one of — a solar system is just the easiest example because power purchase agreements have been around for a million years. When campuses do that, the benefit they have, I mentioned our $7 billion deferred maintenance backlog. Well, what does that tell you? We don't have the money to maintain things. So the last thing we need is to own a sophisticated piece of equipment. That we may or may not have the staff who really knows how to manage it other than basic maintenance.

We're still going to have to contract out to switch out the inverters every 5-10 years, whatever, as they degrade. So we haven't found that particular element of the program as directly advantageous. I don't want to disparage the program because I think it's incredible that this amount of money and effort is getting put towards this work, but we need bigger chunks of money available to really invest.

David Roberts

Are you asking the state government? I assume you're up in Sacramento —

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah.

David Roberts

— nagging the relevant people.

Lindsey Rowell

We're working with legislators in Sacramento and in DC because a lot of this money — this amount of money has got to come from the federal level. Right. The state has, California has a lot of money —

David Roberts

But a lot of debt, too.

Lindsey Rowell

Has a lot of debt and it has a huge population that it has to serve and we need big federal dollars that are coming. And so just trying to help folks understand the actual set of circumstances when someone needs to cut a check —

David Roberts

That's what it comes down to.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, what it comes down to because we don't want to lose a lot of money through administrative processes. And the other thing with that that I think is really important to mention that I think does not get understood on the Hill, for example, is that when you have a rigorous process for these programs, the institutions that get left behind are the same institutions and the same people that get left behind for every other social economic climate program there is: It's the poor people with no resources. They don't have the money to contract for consultants to help them do these applications.

David Roberts

So the application process itself is a barrier.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, yeah. So there needs to be some streamlining, and I think the federal government has heard that. But, of course, when these statutes are written, they come with a lot of legal constraints that they have. So it's just tremendously complicated. It's not like someone on the Hill can wave a magic wand and just go "Oh, we'll just do it like this." Because they also are responsible for taxpayer dollars, and they better make sure that if they're going to put a trillion dollars towards something, it's going to get spent where they said it's going to get spent.

David Roberts

Right. Well, let's talk some nuts and bolts. So you said you have a $7 billion with a B deferred maintenance backlog. I'm wondering if there are things you can do that would serve the dual purpose of maintenance and decarbonization. In other words, could you try to dig out of that hole in a way that also serves your carbon goals?

Lindsey Rowell

Yes, 100%. That is actually our approach and has been forever. So we really look at opportunities to dovetail energy projects with maintenance projects for the simple reason that if you're going to cut into a hard lid and send some tradesperson up there crawling around, like, why do that twice?

David Roberts

Yeah, right.

Lindsey Rowell

Just the simple economics of that, of patching and painting and laying down equipment and bringing contractors out, is a lot cheaper to do one time than multiple times. One of the things we like to say in our unit is that all maintenance is energy efficiency. Right. You make pipes stop leaking, you make equipment more efficient, you change out fans that aren't working and dampers that are stuck and fix economizers, you're not only addressing your maintenance issues, but you are making things operate more efficiently. So we look at that approach, and luckily, this is an advantage that the CSU has with regard to how we spend our funding.

We have this operational budget, and we don't have to say this money is going specifically for this project. We make that designation ourselves in our office. So as long as we're capturing it completely for the purposes of the Department of Finance, the scope can be the scope. So there's a little bit of flexibility there to make sure that money is being spent where it's supposed to be spent.

David Roberts

And I'm going to guess, as I was thinking about this, 23 campuses getting to zero carbon. My intuition was that buildings must be the big ticket item in terms of the heating and cooling, the amount of infrastructure required to heat and cool them, the construction budget itself, the embedded. Because one thing I thought was important to mention, I forgot to mention it earlier, but we should put this in the context of your goals, is that when you talk about carbon neutrality, you're also talking about scope 3 emissions.

Lindsey Rowell

It's so scary.

David Roberts

Yeah, that's the most mind-blowing part to me, and I'm going to return to this later because for readers who are not familiar, scope 1 and 2 emissions are sort of the emissions from the energy that you're directly using. But scope 3 is the emissions sort of embedded in the materials you use, the energy that people use to transport themselves to the campus, like all sorts of sprawling stuff that goes well beyond the campuses. So we'll return to that later. But I'm assuming that. Am I right to say that buildings are sort of item one on the list here in terms of emissions?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, I think so. I mean, the estimates from the Department of Energy are all kind of — they shift a little bit, but generally we say between 30 and 40% of our emissions in the United States are attributable to buildings. Right.

David Roberts

You think that's true of your system, too?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, I would say campuses are easiest to understand if you think of them as little cities, right. There's big buildings with various operations. All in all, it's operating on a curve that is similar to a city, right? Like early morning to midday and some into late night. And then there's a variety of practices between labs or a library or an office, whatever that's happening in there. And then they're spread out. Right. There's geography and landscaping and agriculture. There's everything.

David Roberts

Food. We're going to get to that later, too. But let's talk buildings. You must have some really old. You've been around a century. You must have some big old, drafty buildings, I'm guessing.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, Chico and San Jose have been around a very long time. Sacramento State just celebrated its 75th birthday, so there's a few things that have gotten taken care of through sort of seismic updates. After the 1989 quake, a lot of buildings across, not just for the CSU, but across the state, really got retrofitted to accommodate the moving and shaking that is our lovely state out here on the west coast. And at that time, windows, building skins, rooftops were replaced. Insulation was making buildings more efficient as part of just a general practice of making them more safe.

But that said, there are still buildings from the 1980s and even the early 90s, when we were still kind of getting hip to a lot of these sort of efficiency practices. So, yeah, there's a lot of just general work to do. And then on top of that, the big thing, obviously, is the distribution of energy around the system.

David Roberts

Yeah. Can you even generalize across 23 campuses? How are they generally heated and cooled?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, I can actually generalize. So pretty much every campus, in fact, I can't think of one off the top of my head, has a core campus that's served by a central, like a district energy system.

David Roberts

Oh, all of them?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah.

David Roberts

Oh, interesting.

Lindsey Rowell

Some of them have buildings that are sort of off the loop based on where they are on the campus property or who owns them, you know, if it was a public-private partnership or something like that. But, yeah, generally speaking, we have a district energy system at every campus. Some of them have co-generation. Although we had three campuses as part of the cap and trade program in California, we now are down to one. The other two have successfully decarbonized to get under the threshold for emissions to no longer need to be a part of that program. So that's really tremendous.

And then we did have our one campus, Channel Islands, had a large 25 megawatt co-generation system that was partnered with the southern California energy utility for grid stability and parity. So that's generally the situation. Some campuses have really sophisticated tunnel systems, which are awesome because it makes maintenance and protection systems really great. But of course —

David Roberts

Oh, it just like shelters the infrastructure, basically.

Lindsey Rowell

It does. And it means everything runs underground where temperatures stay more stable, access.

David Roberts

So what are these district heating systems running on? You said there were three that were co-generation. What are the rest of them? Are most of them natural gas?

Lindsey Rowell

Natural gas boilers, yeah.

David Roberts

Are there any geothermal?

Lindsey Rowell

No, we have no geothermal. In fact, didn't think that geothermal would really be a feasible option for us, but have recently learned that some of the newer geothermal technology, as it relates to ocean chilling could really maybe be something we use.

David Roberts

Yes, I'm familiar and excited about those developments.

Lindsey Rowell

This is the best thing about this job. Right. There's always something changing in the technology that you get to learn.

David Roberts

So you have lots of natural gas based district heating systems. What do you do to a natural gas based district heating system to decarbonize it? Do you just switch out the natural gas boiler for what, a big heat pump? What do you do?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah. So that's where sort of the individual campus dynamic is going to become a bigger factor depending on how far they're moving heating — so our chilling is almost all electric. Most campuses have electric chilling, and that can be offset with renewables, which is fantastic. And then a lot of campuses have and or are looking at thermal energy storage, allowing them to benefit from that. So that's been really exciting. I love that work, and it's really just a good old fashioned energy project that's really solid.

David Roberts

Can I ask what kind of thermal storage people are looking at?

Lindsey Rowell

Campuses have like a two phase ice system. Most of them have chilled water.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Lindsey Rowell

Like water tanks, which works fantastic for 99% of the state. Humboldt is our little outlier up there — the place that never gets warm.

David Roberts

Right, the non-warm California campus.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, the one non-warm or San Francisco, I guess, could be —

David Roberts

Yeah, I guess this should have occurred to me earlier, but I guess heating itself is not a big issue. Mostly you're dealing with air conditioning.

Lindsey Rowell

Right. So, the boiler replacement is mostly — so, you know, our temperate climate gives us a couple of benefits. One, the boilers that are out there on the market can serve our purposes if we can figure out a way to lower temperature and circulation without causing major issues with our distribution system, like leaking Victaulics and other valves in the system. And also if we have coils throughout our units, our air handlers and units throughout buildings that can function on that lower temperature hot water. If they can't, then we're talking about — there's major engineering you're having to take out, replace a natural gas boiler with electric heating boiler.

Can't get the water up to circulating at 185 degrees. It's circulating at 145, maybe 155. And you've got coils in your units that maybe are only thresholded at 165. All of that stuff has to get replaced.

David Roberts

So if you switch out the boiler, there's a bunch of other reengineering —

Lindsey Rowell

There can be. And for most of our campuses, it seems like that all of those secondary effects are needed, although I don't know, if it keeps getting warmer, maybe we won't need to heat at all.

David Roberts

Do all of your campuses have, like, energy people, managers, somebody whose job it is to?

Lindsey Rowell

Yes, aside from vacancies that occur through attrition and things like that, part of our requirement is that every campus have an energy manager. They do a tremendous amount of work on this. But like the central plant, the district heating question with the boilers, a lot of these campuses, their domestic hot water is tied to their district hot water, their heating hot water. So for them to just — they can't just turn off their boilers in the summer. For example, one of our mechanical review board members loves to — he's like, "Why are they running the boilers in the summer?

It's like, "Well, you still got to have hot water in your labs and your lavatories." So sort of this, like, well, I guess I would say lack of foresight, but it's not really that. Right? Lack of crystal ball, when years ago, these systems were created.

David Roberts

So if you can get the systems onto electricity, basically, you can call that carbon neutral by buying renewable energy certificates, basically, by vouchsafing that the electricity is clean. Is that the idea?

Lindsey Rowell

Not allowed in the CSU.

David Roberts

Oh, really? You guys are really playing on the hard setting, then.

Lindsey Rowell

That's not true. It's not not allowed in the CSU. It's not allowed by Lindsey. So if someone else comes along and says, "You're stupid and this is impractical", they can —

David Roberts

"Good God, woman, make things easier for yourself for once."

Lindsey Rowell

I know this is a deep, dark hole that we've dug ourselves, but my feeling about offsetting is that our points of pride in the CSU are that the community that we serve stays here. So our students tend to live and work in the communities where they go to school. One in ten workers in California has a CSU degree. I feel that buying credits is a misrepresentation of our obligation to the people that we serve. And so, our working policy now, within my group and with the support of my team, our team, is that we will not purchase offsets until we get to that point where we just, like, can't.

We don't have the money, or that we're at that last 5% or 10% to get over the hump. And realistically, we'd like to keep it in the family. Right. Where we have a CSU fence line, and we go, okay, if we're buying offsets, it's through a campus over generating, and we're accounting for it at another campus that can't.

David Roberts

We might be talking about two different things. Two things to keep distinct. One is carbon offsets.

Lindsey Rowell

Sure. And one is renewable energy credits, and...

David Roberts

One is renewable energy credits. Offsets. I can see absolutely the case for not relying on offsets. I get. But for your electricity, if you don't rely on renewable energy credits, you are having to self generate in real time the electricity you're using —

Lindsey Rowell

That is what we're angling for.

David Roberts

Which is super hard.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, it is super hard. I'm kind of conflating the two. Because —

David Roberts

You don't want to do either.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, they're interchangeable in my mind. So really, what we want to see happen is that we exhaust all opportunity to generate on our campuses the offset that we need and own those credits. Now, the fact I was born at night but not last night, I know that that is a huge undertaking.

David Roberts

Yeah, as part of this, you must be trying to install quite a bit of —

Lindsey Rowell

We are.

David Roberts

Yeah. Renewable energy on your campuses.

Lindsey Rowell

We are. Tremendous amounts of renewable. And also looking at, like I said, maybe an opportunity for geothermal, like large scale geothermal that a single campus wouldn't be able to use. But we could sort of account for that again in the family.

David Roberts

Right. Sort of sell it to another campus, more or less, kind of. I mean, surely if you have 23 campuses in California, some of them are sitting on top of some geothermal.

Lindsey Rowell

Oh, for sure. Especially up north, and then it looks like down south and in the Imperial Valley, there's possibly some opportunities, and we're starting to investigate that as how do we do a partnership on that in a way to afford it.

David Roberts

Would be nice to get like a real power plant sized power plant.

Lindsey Rowell

Oh, it'd be so cool. If anyone out there wants to write me a check...

David Roberts

Yeah. Because everything else is just like little bits here and there. So I guess you're like covering all your roofs with solar panels. Parking...

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, mostly parking. Roofs are tricky just because of warranties and access and that kind of thing, and the age of our buildings. But we're really trying to do this to where the CSU is in and of itself, carbon neutral and net zero. And we've set the goal that way, knowing that getting to 0% is like, that's not a real thing, right? Functional zero. And knowing that we're probably going to hit a wall at some point where it's like we're constrained by finances, we're constrained by property, we're constrained —

David Roberts

Well, yeah, land.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah. There's a whole bunch of potential hurdles there that might just put up a brick wall that we can't get through.

David Roberts

Could you theoretically own a big solar field that's not on one of your campuses, like somewhere else?

Lindsey Rowell

I mean, some of the campuses. Cal Poly SLO has actually done that through the RES-BCT program for the PG&E. They've put in a large — you know, now, for the purposes of this discussion, don't quote me, because I can't remember if the campus actually owns the property or if it's a lease agreement, but it's off the campus proper. They've got a large system that they installed to serve, like their equine center and their ag center that are off the campus grid, basically.

David Roberts

Is there a campus that is generating as much electricity as it is using yet?

Lindsey Rowell

There's a couple campuses that are close. So Long beach is actually pretty close. I think Fullerton is pretty close. Sac State is going to be pretty close. Several of the campuses are under contract for solar and microgrid systems that are going to get them close, at the very least, going to position themselves for meeting those longer term goals.

David Roberts

Yeah, I do see now why a geothermal power plant would really come in.

Lindsey Rowell

That'd be cool. It'd come in super handy.

David Roberts

Yeah. Speaking of microgrids, I love me some microgrids. And campuses are sort of kind of the iconic place to do it. You have control of the whole system. So do you have microgrids, islandable microgrids set up anywhere yet?

Lindsey Rowell

So, we don't have islandable microgrids. The regulatory environment in California to actually come off grid is extremely, I'll say, complicated. You could do a whole show on that, David. Actually, it would be really interesting to hear how people characterize that situation, but we're really approaching it right now through the lens of resiliency, because since the paradise fire in northern California in 2017, the public safety shut offs that the utilities are allowed to enact to protect the grid during inclement weather has affected campuses pretty severely. They've lost power for five, six, seven days.

David Roberts

Yeah. And it occurs to me that you must have some labs and stuff where a blackout is a big deal.

Lindsey Rowell

Yes, that's very true. We have labs, we have vivariums, we have critical ops. We have archives, all kinds of stuff that needs to be protected. And obviously, we have generators, but no one designs a generator to run for ten days. So even on e-circuits, it's still more than we're capable of supporting over a long period of time. So, we're looking at a lot of this as an opportunity to reconfigure our electrical system so that only the appropriate operations are served by emergency circuits, and that we have battery backup that offers some longer term, and then also, at least in the interim, pair it with our — some campuses have fuel cells. All of them have generators. So use that microgrid operation for a resiliency purpose. Not so much for islanding right now.

David Roberts

So is there a campus currently where if the grid goes down for one of these planned outages, it can stay on? Is that, like, up and running anywhere, or is this just a gleam in your eye?

Lindsey Rowell

Well, I guess I should ask a clarifying question. If you mean are there any campuses that could continue business as usual?

David Roberts

Well. How about continue some modified, reduced version of business as usual. So their vivariums, right, and labs can stay going, let's say.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah. So every campus can do that to a degree. Right. So every campus has enough backup. But I wouldn't say — I'm going to infer what you're asking and basically say, could you go to minimal operations where some classes or some research?

David Roberts

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lindsey Rowell

Basically the answer to that is "no." There's enough backup generation to allow enough time so that a faculty member, for example, could make alternative arrangements for their critters that they're researching somewhere or something like that. Or make a note on their data that there was a disruption. There's enough time to kind of get your affairs in order.

David Roberts

Right.

Lindsey Rowell

Okay, we're going minimal ops, and this one room is going to be available. Ideally, we'd have something like that, although I would say, interestingly, the pandemic has changed that. Right. Our ability to pivot to an online pedagogy has, like, wow, suddenly we can do that. So a very few classes that can't just go, "okay, we're going to catch up on labs when we get through this outage in a few days."

David Roberts

So, beefing that up, it seems to me, was mostly about installing more solar and more batteries. Are you just going nuts on storage?

Lindsey Rowell

We are. We're really trying. It's difficult because, again, we're doing that through third party power purchase agreements. But we have a few campuses, actually, that are under contract right now for solar and battery. So kind of the building blocks of their microgrids. And then we'll look towards expanding into microgrid controllers and all of the secondary electrical work. Actually, we have quite a few. Several of the Sonoma State has broken ground on theirs. Cal Poly Humboldt, Cal State San Marcos, they're all moving forward with their microgrid plans, and that's just to name a few.

David Roberts

Final electricity/building question is, since you have these semi self-contained campuses, can they serve as virtual power plants? Can they sell grid services? Is that even up and running yet in California? Is that doable yet, or is that something you have on the horizon?

Lindsey Rowell

I'm so glad you asked that question. I'm super duper, duper excited about virtual power planting.

David Roberts

Me too. I need to do an episode just on them.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, yeah, you really should, because I'm just learning about this — yes. So the answer to your question is yes, no, yes, yes. It's not happening yet in California. There's definitely some regulatory hurdles here. There used to be sort of virtual net metering and aggregated net metering programs in place with the utilities that have gone away over the time or morphed into different things and so there's some regulatory issues to deal with there. But my team and I have really been talking about the coordination between our microgrids and our thermal energy storage as a real opportunity to virtual power plant among our campuses and also —

David Roberts

Demand shift.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, demand shift. And also as an opportunity as we're talking about these sort of what do we do with the campuses that can't put renewable energy right. Can we help support each other in this sort of regional way? So, we're just in our infancy sort of investigating this, but so excited about the possibilities.

David Roberts

Yeah, I wonder and maybe things aren't far enough along for you to know this, but I don't have any sense of what the scale could be on that. Would you imagine being compensated for grid services in your various campuses being a real substantial income stream? Or is this more like a frill? Do you know what I mean? Like how are you thinking about it?

Lindsey Rowell

So my first response to that is I don't know, but my second response is based on California's history with how it operates within the confines of utility regulation and with our new NEM 3.0 requirements, I cannot see this being an income stream. That's me and my crystal ball. I would be very surprised, but I would say maybe the benefits would be more like "grid stability is good for everybody" kind of a thing.

David Roberts

Yeah. VPPs are great just for their —

Lindsey Rowell

For their own merits. Right. Just the purpose.

David Roberts

So one final question about buildings, which is just something that occurred to me as I was thinking about this, is, are you out building new anything, new campuses or new —? Because I would imagine building new stuff that works for these goals is a lot easier than retrofitting stuff. But are you even doing any new stuff? And is sort of tightening requirements for new stuff a big piece of this?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, I think we're in an interesting time for that. I mean, we are building new buildings in alignment with our master plans for campuses. Post-COVID, though, I think there's a need to analyze the asset and real estate needs. Are they the same as they were? What is the next generation going to expect with regard to their on campus experience versus their online experience? And then, you know, looking at population growth in California, which has slowed, do we look at building new institutions to serve communities that know rural or have a long commute to a four year institution?

Or does that not make much sense? Do we do satellites or do we do remote learning centers? So I think there is a lot of uncertainty there. Not in a bad way, but just in a "Jeez, everybody, this was a global pandemic. What a weird thing to have happened. And now it's brought up all these questions." And then I think the other thing is, there's a very real understanding among our capital team, of which my group is a part, that the most sustainable building is the building that's already built.

David Roberts

Yeah.

Lindsey Rowell

So all of the folks that I work with, my peers in the executive leadership sort of group, are very aware of this. And instead of being like, well, we're going to just do business as usual. Everybody's really cohesively talking about, do we need to rethink our strategy? Do we need to start thinking about what buildings can be saved? How can we reduce waste?

David Roberts

Right. Infill, versus sprawl.

Lindsey Rowell

Yes, that risk is — the liability that we have. The further out we spread our boundaries in terms of our assets is real. Right. This is all stuff, space that has to be insured. And then we've got space that if it's not serving its function anymore, do we really need to demo it or should it be retrofitted? So, I think that's a conversation we're having, and I think we're probably going to be seeing maybe a shift in how we evaluate whether a new building needs to be constructed versus an old building being rehabbed.

David Roberts

Interesting. Let's talk a little bit about scope 3.

Lindsey Rowell

No.

David Roberts

Honestly, for any institution, scope 3 is a little bit overwhelming and baffling. But for something like campuses, like you say, they are little cities. So, scope 3 involves a lot. The first question is just, do you feel like you have reliable tools to measure and assess scope 3 emissions? Because the whole field around scope 3 emissions seems a little bit nascent to me. What's your take on that?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, I was just going to say no, I don't feel like we have the tools and go farther to say that anyone that tells you that they do is lying.

David Roberts

People are working on them, allegedly.

Lindsey Rowell

The colleagues, the folks that I work with, we all sit around the tables going, "What are you guys doing with scope 3? What are you doing with scope — ?" Or somebody called it scope 4, because we've got scope 3, like transportation, and scope 4 is the embodied carbon piece, or scope 3a, whatever. And everybody is just going "Where do you even start?"

David Roberts

Where do you begin?

Lindsey Rowell

It's so massive. The transportation piece is getting a little bit better configured. Although I think the definition of what is our responsibility and what is other people's responsibility and how do we avoid double counting or not counting is still a question. But we're trying to do better on sort of our programmatic elements of that related to alternative transportation and fuels and that kind of thing.

David Roberts

Well, I mean, if any student at any one of your 23 campuses drives their car to the campus —

Lindsey Rowell

That's us.

David Roberts

Boom, you've got some scope 3 emissions there. So you have to theoretically get all however many thousand students. You said some mind-boggling number. You have to get them all to the campuses without driving. That alone is like, how on earth do you do that? I mean, I know you can do some carpool programs, but you don't control public transit. You don't control zoning decisions —

Lindsey Rowell

Boundary responsibility. Well, it's the same thing with embodied carbon. Right? Like, I don't control how lumber is milled and where it comes from.

David Roberts

This was my other question, which is, even if you could measure the amount of embodied carbon coming in through building materials, say, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a source of carbon-free building materials even available to you.

Lindsey Rowell

So where we are with this now, which is to say, not far. So there are some firms, like, working on sort of software tools to help start tracking this. The state of California does require environmentally preferable purchasing or reporting on construction materials and things like that. So we do do that. The cynic in me is like, is this even close to, like, is this even accurate enough to merit tracking?

David Roberts

Right, right.

Lindsey Rowell

But the optimist in me is like, okay, well, we got to start somewhere. So tracking what you're using is a place to start, and then at least you can put rules of thumb to it. Right? Like, how many pounds of steel do we use? How many pounds of lumber, how many pounds of concrete? And as a rule, regardless of where it comes from, what is the carbon impact of those materials, even though the specifics of where they come from and how they're milled and all that stuff has an impact, it at least gives you some framework to start from, because where it is right now is just like pulling numbers out of the damn sky. Just don't know.

David Roberts

There's a lot of dreamed up numbers in that general vicinity.

Lindsey Rowell

I mean, for organizations like mine, or ours, not mine, right.

David Roberts

Do you even have the staff? Do you have the staff to do this?

Lindsey Rowell

Exactly. Like, the administrative and transactional costs associated with tracking that information is — I couldn't even begin to. You could have someone in every unit for every project doing only that. Only that.

David Roberts

Yeah. Really seems like a place where you really badly need better tools, like standardized, off the shelf.

Lindsey Rowell

Very, very much. I feel like this is a supply chain matter, right, ideally. But because it doesn't work to rely — we have to try and take responsibility on our own. We can't force industry to make these adjustments.

David Roberts

It does seem like, though, especially in scope 3, you are, to some unavoidable degree, dependent on developments that you have no control over. Right. Like what the state does or even what the federal government does.

Lindsey Rowell

Right, so at this point, it's more about just understanding what we use. When we feel like we can track that with some degree of accuracy, we'll feel like we've made a tremendous success. We are including scope 3 as part of our carbon reduction.

David Roberts

That's crazy; that's just crazy.

Lindsey Rowell

I'm going to retire before all this.

David Roberts

In your mind's eye, when 2045 rolls around and CSU is carbon neutral, how are people getting to school? What does the zero carbon, just the transport alone, just the transport angle alone, what would it look like for that to be truly carbon free? No more gas cars, I guess. No more gas cars on the street.

Lindsey Rowell

We have the best chance of it in California, right. Like we're moving away from petrol, as it were, in California. So my thought is that if things were to go my way, it'd be a combination of things. Obviously, where — we have good public transit, we have good programs for students, shuttle systems and stuff that aren't necessarily related to the community programs, regional transit and things like that, that we have a little bit more control over, and then electric vehicles and mobility devices which have their own issues. I mean, we've got concerns related to lithium ions, and everything is a rabbit hole but —

David Roberts

Once you scope 3 it, all of a sudden, EVs are not as uncomplicated as they seem.

Lindsey Rowell

Exactly. And I think the other combination with that is, do we have students coming to school when they don't need to be?

David Roberts

Right.

Lindsey Rowell

Like, are students coming to school for classes where they really don't need to be? Could you be doing this class once a week instead of three times a week, and the rest of the class is held online? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know that that is the answer. But I think all of those avenues need to be investigated so that we understand what students need, what they want, and how we can meet these goals while giving them both of those things. The college experience that they want, and the education they need. Think about how much reduction that would be to just have someone for one class going, well, I only have to come to campus one day a week.

David Roberts

Yeah. That's an easy lever to pull. For sure.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, for sure.

David Roberts

One can imagine ways of decarbonizing that do not serve resilience, that leave campuses sort of brittle or vulnerable. Talk a little bit about just the effects you've seen of climate and severe weather on your campuses and how you're thinking about resilience as part of decarbonization.

Lindsey Rowell

Well, so this is such a hard question because we just had fairly recently in California a hurriquake. Have you heard of this?

David Roberts

No.

Lindsey Rowell

New weather phenomenon.

David Roberts

Oh, good. Have fun.

Lindsey Rowell

Our campus, San Bernardino, out in the inland empire, was hit by torrential rains from a hurricane. At the same time, there was an inland earthquake — and they had like four inches of water on their gym. And they're out in what we would refer to as kind of the low desert. They're not in a place where you think of flooding exactly. You definitely don't think of being impacted by a hurricane. And then they also suffer the wildfires from sweeping through the valley there. Poor campus. We use them as an example. And they're such good sports about it, but so there's that.

And then, like I said, we had a couple of days ago, now I've got phone calls out to our campuses in San Jose to see if their Moss Landing Institute was impacted by these waves coming in off the coast. They've got research right up butted up against the ocean where they impacted by that? So wildfires and public safety shut offs are the main impacts. Right. And then, of course, drought across California because this is a desert state, most of it. And we go through decade long periods of drought. One of the things we're trying to do is we've developed a resilient infrastructure guidelines model.

So it's a tool to allow campuses, when they're planning projects and capital construction to think about their designs in terms of the resiliency hazards, potential climate hazards and resiliency impacts their campus might face as a result of where they are geographically, their age, the condition of their infrastructure, so on and so forth, and then use that for those projects, but then also for their utility master planning efforts and their critical infrastructure reports to kind of help prioritize how they should be looking at their infrastructure upgrades. Because if you're a campus that has been experiencing drought, you're not necessarily going to think about prioritizing your stormwater plan, stormwater infrastructure. But if you don't and you find out that three other institutions in your immediate area have had massive millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of damage and shutdown resulting from water intrusion because they didn't have a good stormwater infrastructure. Maybe you need to be thinking about that a little bit more.

That needs to be bumped up the priority list, perhaps more. So that's one of the tools we're using. It's actually pretty sophisticated and we've been working on it for a couple of years, and then it's intended to stay kind of a living document because the climate is changing.

David Roberts

Indeed.

Lindsey Rowell

Universities are changing.

David Roberts

Yeah, that's truly a moving target. I've burned up all my time, so I don't have time to talk about food. But obviously I feel like I should at least mention it because among all the many other things that you have to worry about, once you're talking about decarbonization and scope 3, and everything else is food incoming food service, food waste. Could you give us like a one or two line how you're thinking about food, answer?

Lindsey Rowell

I can summarize food by saying it is almost as difficult as scope 3.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, we should talk about this at another time. We can get into some of this, David, but it is tremendously difficult. It's another thing that crosses those boundary lines. And then the one thing that I think people in your audience definitely will not know is that the way most, this is true of most universities, not just ours, is that the way food works on their campuses is through auxiliary services, meaning they have contracts for food providers through their 501(c)(3).

David Roberts

Right. So once again, you're dependent on, you need someone to provide carbon free food service or else what can you do?

Lindsey Rowell

Right, right. And then you've got all the safety policies. Right. Because we spend a lot of time on the food waste side, too, going, okay, we have students who are food insecure and you're going to throw away all this food from some box lunch thing, can we give it away? And you got to go through risk management for all that. Like everything else, it's just a rabbit hole. And that is. Oh, man, that is a tough one.

David Roberts

Interesting. Yeah, it's something that I think my sort of like, energy nerd world crowd doesn't think about a ton. Same with kind of agriculture.

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah. Interesting to see how they cross.

David Roberts

Final question here is, just as I said earlier, it is sort of, I don't know, like amusing and poignant to me to imagine you sitting in your office thinking about basically how to transform a decent chunk of the state in the next few years. So you've been given this mandate, which, you know, thanks a lot. So what when you think about California politicians now and regulators, what do they not get? And if you had to sort of prioritize a couple of things that you would ask from them besides money, like give me some money, obviously. But in terms of law or regulatory support, are there a couple of top line items that would make your life easier?

Lindsey Rowell

Yeah, I think the government really needs to facilitate partnerships a bit more. I don't know that any one organization like ours, or even the UC, which is obviously a huge and well recognized, world renowned organization, has an easy time developing relationships with nonprofits, with commercial interests, supply chain groups, and those partnerships are imperative. And I think the thing that frustrates me with the money question is, the money is out there. We know it exists; like, the actual physical pieces of paper are available. And I tend to think that there's probably a lot more interest among the community, be it business, be it private philanthropy, anywhere, that they would like to know how they can help, how they can be a part of this.

And I don't feel like the government does anything to try and facilitate those partnerships. And so we're all sort of feeling around in the dark in this room, trying to find who we are and then also not waste each other's time. Right. Do I have what you want? Do you have what I want? There is some organization that could happen here that I think would be really helpful —

David Roberts

Are not duplicating efforts. It seems like there's got to be lots of big organizations that need roughly the same things you need.

Lindsey Rowell

And there's services, there's firms that do this kind of work, certainly, that have a lot of these contacts. But for organizations like the community colleges and the CSUs, they don't have the funding to go out and hire people for these sort of theoretical connections. So I would really like to see, other than the money — don't forget the money — but other than the money, sort of that. And then also related to these programs, just streamlining, what do you, as a legislator and your aides and the people within the organizations over whom you are responsible, what do they really need to see?

Are we doing reporting? Are we punching numbers? Are we investing time and staff and money in information that you're never going to look at, is never going to get verified? It's not useful to anybody. And can that be simplified?

David Roberts

Yeah, a lot of it. Just about. It seems like communication between legislators and regulators and people like you who are out in the implementation swamp, better communication would be a great thing.

Lindsey Rowell

Yes.

David Roberts

Thank you so much, Lindsey. This is just fascinating. Like decarbonization in general is just a giant puzzle, and every little piece of it is a puzzle, but you've got your hands on a really big piece of the puzzle. So I'm sure it feels overwhelming and slightly ridiculous what you're being asked to do. But I will say it comforts me to know that there are people like you out there really doing the ground, the block and tackle work of making this happen.

Lindsey Rowell

Yes, it's comforting to me to know that there's people like you out there spreading the word that this work is going on.

David Roberts

Oh, good. Well, we've comforted one another in the storm.

Lindsey Rowell

The marginal success of the day.

David Roberts

Beautiful. All right, thanks so much, Lindsey.

Lindsey Rowell

Thank you, David.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf. So that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.