Energy efficiency in all NYC public schools

From the Green Roof Team: The mayor launched the energy efficiency program in April, 2009 and joined the Green Schools Alliance (see the announcement below). Ms Marsh went to a Professional Development last week and reported at the Green Roof meeting yesterday that she has found out how PS 58 can sign up for the energy program. This would allow us to track how much energy PS 58 consumes and how we can go about reducing it. The children would be able to see very clearly the effects of shutting down all the school computers, not using the aircon etc. Energy Efficiency Benchmarked at All Public School Buildings 04/09/2009 New York City Becomes First Public School District in the Nation to Join the Green Schools Alliance Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, Rohit T. Aggarwala, today announced that the Department of Education (DOE) has taken a major step towards reducing energy consumption by City schools by analyzing the energy efficiency of the district’s 1,260 school buildings through a process called benchmarking. Benchmarking gives a detailed understanding of the efficiency of each building, and helps the Department of Education target efficiency efforts where they will have the greatest impact. The effort is part of the City’s overall efforts to achieve its PlaNYC target of reducing municipal government energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2017. Chancellor Klein and Sustainability Director Aggarwala also announced that the Department of Education is the first public school district in the nation to join the Green Schools Alliance, a nonprofit initiative committed to promoting energy efficiency, resource conservation and environmental awareness and responsibility in schools. Through the Green Schools Alliance, schools share experiences and expertise to lower their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Schools Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm and Sustainability Director Aggarwala were joined at the DOE headquarters in the Tweed Courthouse in Manhattan by Division of School Facilities (DSF) Chief Executive John Shea, GSA Founder and President Peg Watson, Department of Citywide Administrative Services Commissioner Martha K. Hirst, School Construction Authority Vice President for Architecture and Engineering E. Bruce Barrett and representatives from community groups that support conservation. “This project to benchmark our buildings represents our largest commitment yet to reduce energy consumption in our schools,” said Chancellor Klein. “As a result of this project, our schools will be more efficient—and our environment will be cleaner. This is important work for our City, and it’s a powerful lesson for our students about the importance of sustainability.” “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said Rohit Aggarwala, director of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability. “The Department of Education’s benchmarking of 1,260 school buildings will enable us to make decisions as to which measures we should implement to reduce our City’s greenhouse gases and save money on our energy bills. It also demonstrates that benchmarking is an easy process that yields important information for any kind of building.” Benchmarking is regarded as necessary because a building’s energy bills alone do not provide an understanding of the building’s efficiency. Benchmarking uses the total energy consumed in a building and adjusts for other factors – hours the building is occupied, total square footage, building type, and other factors – so that an owner or manager can understand whether high energy bills are really due to inefficiency. The Department of Education used the “Energy Star Portfolio Manager” online benchmarking tool, a widely-recognized standard created by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the use of this tool is the first step in most professional energy audits and is a pre-requisite for the US Green Building Council’s LEED rating for existing buildings. The total process for the first 800 school buildings took a year and was accomplished by the Department of Education staff with the assistance from the Mayor’s Office, DCAS, the EPA, and the City University of New York’s Building Performance Laboratory. The program also is accessible to schools that are given passwords, allowing students to monitor energy usage on their own. Forty-five private schools launched the Green Schools Alliance in October 2007 in response to Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Since then, the GSA’s membership has grown to more than 200 schools nationwide, which participate in myriad GSA programs that motivate and support school communities to make energy and climate a priority. GSA also offers on-line tools and resources to support schools at its Web site. The Department of Education is the first public school system in the nation to join the GSA, and will encourage its schools to participate in the GSA’s Green Schools NYC, an on-going school resource-sharing event and the Green Cup Challenge, an annual national, student-driven event that supports school-based efforts to measure and reduce electricity use. The Department of Education will also form a partnership with GSA to arrange internships for high school students who want to build skills in sustainability and energy conservation. “The partnership between the City and the Green Schools Alliance represents our priority of making sustainability a mainstay in our schools,” said Schools Deputy Chancellor Grimm. “This new relationship will help our schools become more energy efficient.” “We now have the tools to target effective energy saving measures in our schools,” said DSF Executive Director John Shea. “It is appropriate and exciting that New York City, the city where the Green Schools Alliance (GSA) was first launched, has become the first public school district to join the GSA as Charter Members,” GSA Founder and President Peg Watson said. “The GSA was created ‘by schools for schools’ to share energy and sustainability best practices, generate momentum and maximize success.” The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services coordinates the City’s energy conservation efforts and provided energy usage data from school buildings for the benchmarking initiative. “I am thrilled to be working so closely with the Department of Education in this important effort to achieve energy savings,” said DCAS Commissioner Martha K. Hirst. “In the next two years, the DCAS Office of Energy Conservation will oversee projects in more than 50 schools that will reduce energy use by installing more efficient lighting. There’s no better way to show young people that there will be a greener, greater New York in their future.”