February/March 2009

Getting Green Done

Forgive Me, Father, I Don’t Have the Money

An excerpt from the book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.

Written By Auden Schendler, Executive Director, Sustainability, Aspen Skiing Company

As with everything in the sustainability business, the hurdles in the building process aren’t technological. So what are they? Often, it comes down to money. Here’s a case study that illustrates the tensions that can arise between green champions and contractors: The building is either in the design phase or designed and ready to go. The green champion says: “Look, I know your budget is fixed. But for just ten percent more, spent now, for some better heating and cooling equipment, window upgrades, and some other minor efficiency tweaks, you could construct a building that would use half (or one-third of, or 20 percent of . . .) the energy over the fifty- to one-hundred-year (or longer) life cycle of the building. And the return on investment for that is under ten years!” Between the lines of such talk the message typically is: “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? It’s so frickin’ obvious! Why don’t you simpletons use life-cycle analysis?” But the contractor says: “I understand the benefits. I beg your pardon, but I’m not stupid. I understand life-cycle analysis. But my budget is fixed. I don’t have any more money. I can’t get any more. What do you want me to do? I just don’t have the money.” Green designers rightfully point out that the decisions you make and the money you spend in the first tiny fraction of a building’s life influence that building forever. But if you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money. There is a way around this challenge of up-front costs, and leave it to Harvard to have found a solution. Tom Vautin, Harvard’s associate vice president for facilities and environmental services, realized that the university wasn’t installing the best equipment with long-term energy savings owing to up-front costs. And he recognized that the issue was purely economic: buildings with long lives should have the best, most energy-efficient equipment. What Vautin did, for purely financial reasons, was set up a revolving loan fund. Project managers who wanted, say, an extra $50,000 for a 96 percent efficient boiler instead of an 86 percent efficient boiler could dip into the fund during building construction and pay the money back out of the energy savings compared to the energy budget for the less efficient boiler. The fund is at work at Harvard today. It ensures that the buildings are the best they can be, and it has the added benefit of protecting the climate every time it gets used. (In the real world, where I dwell, even an elegant program like Tom’s can hit a wall. The most prominent barrier in many companies is management’s refusal to recognize the savings—for example, your budget gets lowered to the new energy-efficient standard. This happens all the time with “performance contracting,” where firms do efficiency retrofits for free and plan to get paid out of savings. Clients sometimes dispute the existence of the savings.)

Excerpted from: Schendler, Auden. Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. By arrangement with Public Affairs (www.publicaffairsbooks.com), a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2009. 189 – 190.

CBG /February/March 2009