Green schools on the rise

April 21, 2015

The U.S. Green Building Council outlined the many benefits of green building for schools and students in a report titled, "Local Leaders in Sustainability: Special Report from Sundance." Building or retrofitting with green design principles can help schools improve the health of their students, ease the strain on the district's budget and eliminate spending waste.

Characteristics of green schools

Some characteristics of green schools include conserving energy and natural resources, reducing peak demand, saving tax payer money, improving indoor air quality, employing sustainable purchasing, encouraging recycling, and even using the sustainable building design as a teaching tool in their STEM curriculum. Green schools promote learning in a healthy environment while saving energy, resources and money. On average, green schools save $100,000 per year on operating costs.  This money may be in turn spent on at least one teacher, computers, or books.

The importance of reducing peak demand
The cost savings in green schools stems from many sources such as more energy efficient lighting, occupancy sensors, daylighting strategies, water efficient fixtures and energy efficient heating and air-conditioning systems. Reducing peak demand is also a very effective strategy, which conserves energy consumption at peak times. According to A Report to California's Sustainable Building Task Force, energy benefits of green buildings needs to be quantified not solely based on reduced energy use but also on reduced peak electricity demand. Using less electricity during the day means avoiding consumption from the least efficient power plants and thereby saving energy at the power source while improving outdoor air quality.

One air-conditioning system in particular, thermal energy storage, has been employed in hundreds of schools across the United States to reduce peak demand. Thermal energy storage systems store cooling at night when the school in unoccupied to cool teachers, students and administrative staff during the day. Reduced peak demand helps schools avoid more expensive daytime energy pricing. In addition, storage can kick on when solar is unavailable which helps avoid spikes in demand. As the grid increases in renewable generation and more schools add solar to their roofs, the technology will continue to gain momentum, and multiple school districts in the U.S. with thermal energy storage solutions in place have already earned a hefty ROI.

Thermal energy storage investments worldwide on the rise
Thermal storage technology has been one of the key contributing solutions driving the surging energy storage boom that has swept the U.S. and the rest of the globe over the past few years. According to The Christian Science Monitor, the projections provided by the Energy Storage Association and GTM Research show that domestic energy storage revenues will rise dramatically from just under $130 million in 2014 to $1.5 billion in 2019.

The same report predicted that dramatic growth is to begin as early as this year. GTM's projections say the domestic installed capacity of all energy storage projects will triple in 2015, ramping up from 62 MW nationwide last year to 220 MW now. Greater adoption of energy storage solutions for non-utility purposes is expected to see significant growth over the next few years, which will account for the increasing numbers of thermal energy storage adopters overall.

School districts save millions
Administrators at schools ranging from public preschools to private universities won't have to look far to see if thermal energy storage can work for their facilities. There are plenty of examples of thermal energy storage already in place that have helped school districts reduce their spending on heating and cooling. The St. Lucie School District in Florida, for example, was able to achieve about $5 million in annual savings by installing thermal energy storage. Likewise, Florida's Sarasota County School District saved $2 million in just one year, the same way.

Both school districts were able to save big thanks to the help of CALMAC and the company's IceBank® energy storage tanks. These installations allow the districts to cool school buildings with ice formed at night. Running chillers during the evening to create ice acts as a means of shifting the campus' peak load and avoiding the high cost of consuming electricity during costly periods of peak demand. Thermal mediums like ice are particularly adept at storing large amounts of energy, making them an ideal solution for supplementing intermittent renewables. 

New legislation provides additional efficiency resources
The nation may see an influx of green building at schools sooner than initially expected, thanks to the Streamlining Energy Efficiency for Schools Act. The U.S. Green Building Council pointed out that the opportunity to pass such bipartisan legislation could light a fire under Congress to advance school efficiency. The successful passage of this legislation stands to put federal programs, incentives for technologies like thermal storage and technical assistance for financing retrofits in a larger spotlight. The resource emphasized that the bipartisan effort provides more efficiency resources and benefits schools, a recipe for appeal across the aisle.