Sustainability in the Built Environment: An Interview with Lincoln Bleveans
By Georgia Kossoff
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The built environment contributes ~40% of the world’s carbon emissions. We discussed the importance of making our physical environment more sustainable in our building automation article. Now, we’re diving deeper with Lincoln Bleveans, Director of Energy and Sustainability at Stanford University, to understand the role that sustainability should play in campus management and how large institutions can reduce – or even eliminate - their carbon footprint.
Lincoln’s role at Stanford
Lincoln runs sustainability, utilities, and infrastructure at Stanford, comprising everything from solar farms to water and civil infrastructure to the campus energy distribution system to waste management. He’s leading the charge on achieving Stanford’s sustainability targets – zero waste by 2030, carbon neutral by 2030, and zero-carbon by 2050. He works at the nexus of all of Stanford’s schools and departments to manage the university’s physical footprint.
Key takeaways
Universities have a dual mandate in the sustainability crisis: to manage / eliminate their own carbon footprint and to use the school’s research resources to serve as a “living lab” for sustainability management.
Measurement is the first step towards footprint management. For an institution like Stanford, you have to measure carbon holistically (including everything from employee commutes to water use to on-campus waste) to fully understand the university’s footprint.
Getting to true carbon-zero (vs carbon neutral) is hard. There are “quick wins” that can quickly eliminate the majority of a facility’s footprint (like switching off natural gas), but truly getting to zero carbon is a more nuanced process, requiring incrementally smaller changes across the ecosystem.
Within the built environment, green building materials (especially concrete), building controls and automation, and energy management will be highest potential solutions and need the most talent to drive innovation.
AI could be a major unlock for energy optimization; there’s opportunity for both startups and large players to move the needle here.
What we learned
[Interview responses condensed / paraphrased]
What role should universities and other large campuses play in the climate crisis?
Universities, especially research universities, are the world’s secret weapon in the climate crisis. A place like Stanford is really a small full-service city. We have an opportunity to operate as a “living lab” when you combine our physical presence with our intellectual horsepower and research resources.
What is Stanford doing to make its campus sustainable?
We created our first sustainability action plan in 2009 when climate change was less visible than it is now. We tackled energy from both the supply and demand side - transitioning from fossil to renewable energy and reducing our demand to make things more efficient. At the same time, we’re running water conservation measures with huge impact and we’re targeting zero waste by 2030. We’re tackling these goals with a huge suite of projects, encompassing literally everywhere you look on campus – from fleet electrification to LED lighting to reconfiguring our entire energy system.
How does Stanford measure and quantify its carbon footprint?
The energy side is easiest to measure; as of March, we’re offsetting all of our electric consumption with solar, we’ve gone to 100% renewable energy. We also measure carbon which we’ve decreased by 78% since our peak and we are doing intensive analysis, planning, and consensus-building to reach our 2030 and 2050 goals. We’re getting very granular on measuring energy consumption – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Everything from commuting trips to water consumption to energy consumption.
Source: Stanford University
Where have you found the largest reductions in carbon footprint?
The SESI project took most of the natural gas out of our energy system and replaced it with renewable energy – that made our carbon drop off a cliff. Now we’re dealing with that last increment – burners in labs, cooking that uses natural gas, a little natural gas needed from a regulatory compliance perspective for the hospitals. There are all these little areas where we’re still emitting carbon. The big low-hanging fruit has been picked and now we have to prioritize those smaller, more difficult pieces of the puzzle.
It’s a mentality shift towards thinking about spending carbon in the same way we think about spending money. “I need to achieve this outcome, how much carbon am I willing to spend to achieve it?” as opposed to “I need to achieve this outcome, it’ll cost us X tons of carbon.” We used to treat carbon like it was infinite and now we have to treat it like it’s finite.
For Gigaton readers interested in sustainability for the built environment, what are the major career paths that exist?
There is so much happening right now with sustainable building materials, particularly concrete. The more you learn about concrete the more worried you are about its environmental footprint. So now there are ways to minimize concrete (e.g., mass timber) but also create concrete that is actually carbon neutral or negative.
There’s also a lot happening in the way that buildings come together from a controls perspective – how you heat them, how you cool them. HVAC might sound like a boring field but it’s actually where we’re taking our built environment to the next level. And now with climate change, there are all these equations that need to be solved that didn’t exist 10 years ago, like how do you control temperature without opening windows during wildfires, etc.
For energy management, the big challenge for the world right now is going to be how we actually power with renewables 24/7 as opposed to just offsetting. Right now, is renewable energy powering your data center in the middle of the night? Probably not, because the amount of renewables available at night (geothermal and wind power from places where the wind blows at night) isn’t sufficient, so you’re probably running off the grid which has other forms powering it at that time. For EVs, the easiest thing to do is to plug them in overnight – we actually have to shift people’s behavior to plugging them in when the sun is out.
What built environment solutions do you think will have the biggest impact?
When you look at the California greenhouse gas inventory, you see a pie chart that shows emissions in the state by sector.
Transportation alone is the biggest category – over 40%. That of course is the most difficult to address because there are (literally) so many moving parts.
The other big part is the built environment. As we create what are basically brand new systems around energy (because we’ve never done a majority renewable energy system, for example) we need to figure out how we work with AI to optimize systems at a level humans can’t comprehend. Look at what’s happening in AI and data centers for reinforcement learning – the AI is seeing correlations that humans just can’t – so how do we apply that to everything from energy production to building management to transportation to autonomous vehicles?
What companies are you most excited about in this space?
Climate technology is a massive field, as pretty much everything in our world has sustainability and resilience elements. Within that “big tent,” there are so many interesting start-ups now – it’s tough to mention a few and not dozens of others!
At the same time, a lot of legacy companies are having to reinvent themselves for this brave new world. Companies like GE and Mitsubishi – they’re all of a sudden realizing that natural gas as a fuel for power generation is going away and they’re scrambling to figure out how to convert their core products (such as combustion turbines) to run on green hydrogen. Also General Motors on the transportation side, they’re reinventing a legacy company around electrified transportation. In Silicon Valley, we focus a lot on startups and there are plenty of them doing great things but if you have the balance sheet of a GM (or a Google or Microsoft for that matter), that’s also a huge opportunity for impact.
What gives you hope in the climate crisis?
Gen-Z: I am awed by not only their raw smarts but the ownership they take of the planet and their ability to question fundamental assumptions around everything, from sustainability to resilience to DEI to justice. This rising generation sees climate change as part of the air they breathe; they’re hundreds of miles ahead in terms of being aware and educated. It probably sounds cliched, but I see this generation – especially Stanford students – as the “Greatest Generation 2.0”.