»

Challenges and Opportunities The first critical step in establishing sustainable campus operations is to fully understand their environmental impacts, a process that includes: • Establishing environmental measures for all key activities. • Assessing the way policy and process drive organisational decision-making and how that may influence the sustainability of operations. • Measuring the effectiveness of campus design and technology on environmental outcomes. • Assessing the sustainability skill levels of the employees operating and maintaining the campus. • Measuring the impact of community behaviour. Once these have been mapped, an approach can be established, based on the principles of technological efficiency and corporate conservation, that will synchronise operations with the sustainability goals that have been established by the university.

Installing effective mete technology ring help identif will infrastructuy re failure

Energy management In the absence of renewable technologies, energy consumption can be the main source of greenhouse gas emissions on a campus. Whether it is maintaining environment control in buildings or the growth of information and communications technology (from the desktop to the campus data centre), power demand is trending up in a sector that is getting bigger every year. The first step in reducing energy consumption is to understand the optimal performance of infrastructure systems (both old and new), and to achieve and maintain it with regular and targeted maintenance by employees with sufficient training and technological skills. Long-term approaches include investments in large scale plants and equipment, such as solarenergy systems and building management systems to establish energy-efficient controls for lighting and air-conditioning, as well as largescale power-generation strategies, including co (or tri) generation, which has the added benefit of providing district heating and/or cooling. Installing effective metering technology will help to identify infrastructure failures that are effectively wasting energy, including thermal leakage through poor insulation or external lighting that fails to switch off.

20

CAMPUS-WIDE OPERATIONS