In 1920, the University of King’s College burnt to the ground. It was the middle of winter. A fire spread through the main building and into adjoining residences, destroying the Windsor, Nova Scotia campus founded in 1789—the oldest chartered university in Canada.
In 1930, the university re-opened at the site it’s on today, adjacent to Dalhousie in Halifax’s south end. The university had rebuilt itself from scratch, with funding given by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on the stipulation that King’s form an association with Dalhousie. And so they did. And they rebuilt.
According to a 2020 retrospective in King’s Tidings magazine for the hundredth-year-anniversary of the fire, the new 1930 buildings were described at the time as “of stone, of fireproof construction, and modern in every respect.” Though modern in 1930, that is hardly the case in 2023.
Today, King’s has again partnered with Dal to rebuild their campus and set a precedent for other universities as a leader in university-wide carbon-neutrality.
If King’s can secure roughly $10 million in funding, it can complete this in two years time. King’s director of facilities management, Ian Wagschal, commissioned an engineering report for the school’s Board of Governors on how to make the 280,000 square foot campus reach its sustainable campus goal, while addressing the out-of-date heating and lack of cooling systems in the campus residences.
One reason none of the residences at King’s have cooling systems is that students don’t generally live on campus during the summer. Unfortunately, summer temperatures no longer remain in those June, July and August months in Nova Scotia. King’s Students’ Union executive member Terra Carter spoke about this at the student-led climate strike in Halifax on Sept. 15.
“Climate change is making it unbearable for all of us to live… Our buildings are built to handle the cold, they are not built to handle this heat because this climate is not meant to be this hot. Now it is. People are suffering.
“The worst part about this is King’s has the plans to fix this. They have the plans for a heat pump installation, but (the Department of) Advanced Education won’t give them the money to do it…
“It is something we’ve been fighting for… getting money to renovate our buildings so that the students who are housed are housed safely.”
Says Wagschal about the two-pronged needs of King’s retrofit projects: “Basically, energy costs are getting higher, and we have all these old buildings that we have to do something with… Because as climate change approaches, what used to be cold buildings are going to become hot buildings because things are gonna get hotter. We’re not gonna have as much heating [needs], but we’re going to have all this cooling that none of these buildings were ever designed to have.”
Wagschal commissioned the Campus Energy Master Plan in 2021/22 “to tell us, ‘Here’s all the things you need to do.’ And, actually the goal is to become carbon neutral, first. And then secondly, to adapt to climate change. So there’s definitely been some student complaints recently because we went through that bout of really hot, humid weather, and people got upset over that.”
Per the 2022 report, “Dillon Consulting Limited was engaged by the University of King’s College to identify energy efficiency measures as part of the Campus Master Energy Plan to reduce greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions and the associated reliance on fossil fuels.” Says King’s director of facilities management, Ian Wagschal, who pushed for this report: “Construction inflation has been incredible in the past two years, so most of the cost estimates are now probably about 20% too low.”
Wagschal says the hottest temperature inside King’s this September was 32 degrees Celsius. “That was in a faculty office, not in a residence room. But the residence rooms will be the same. Most of the residence rooms during the ‘heatwave’—I’m calling it a heatwave though it wasn’t really, and I hope we don’t get a real heatwave because that would be worse—were probably between 28-25 degrees. But it’s the humidity that made everybody so uncomfortable.”
Says Wagschal of King’s, “these buildings have no air conditioning, they have no ventilation systems. They’re built in 1929. They were heated by fireplaces is what they were originally designed for. They didn’t even have really any electrical system until the 1950s. So the same buildings are still there. You know, I’m sure they had heating problems right back from the beginning in terms of being too hot, but also too cold. So in the winter, they get too cold as well because they’re not insulated.”
King’s is heated by steam coming from Dal that is created by fossil fuels. Says Dal’s office of sustainability executive director, Rochelle Owen: “It used to be Bunker C oil, but now it’s natural gas.” The $10 million price tag of King’s retrofit project would essentially transfer steam into hot water heating across campus to be used by an in-ground heat pump that could both cool and heat the buildings efficiently.
“Steam heat is so inefficient that then it overheats everything, and it goes back and forth between extremes,” says Wagschal.
Owen is a grant writer and planner for sustainability projects at Dal, including the IDEAS building on Sexton campus downtown, a smaller Dal campus that, Owen says, “has been converted from steam to hot water, and it does have geo-exchange using the ground heat pump, it does have solar, we have 150 kilowatt of solar on the roof. We have a green roof. So we have, for some of our smaller campuses, done this work already. It’s just we’re a very large entity with 6 million square feet. So, Kings is kind of like one of our buildings in terms of size. So [King’s project is] definitely achievable.”
King’s joined Dal in a recent grant application written by Owen to partner on a $20 million sustainability project, which should award King’s with $200,000 if and when the funding through the federal Low Carbon Economy Fund is released. Says Owen, “then we have to create a contribution agreement to flow the money from Dal to King’s.”
Says Wagschal about the estimated $200,000 King’s is due to receive, “we still have an enormous amount of money to raise to really finish anything significant.
“For some reason, universities have recently been excluded from most of the government programs for energy retrofits… So it isn’t so much that we went and applied to the province for money, it’s that they told us we have no programs to fund you with.
“The programs that we had in the past aren’t applicable. But, we did go to the federal government. So I know that sounds silly, but we’re actually too small. They’re not interested in projects that are smaller than $25 million. And our project is about $10 million. However, Dalhousie is big enough and Dalhousie does have another project that they wanted to do, and so we piggybacked on Dalhousie.”
Deciding where to get funding for decarbonization projects of smaller or larger universities is something both Wagschal and Owen have struggled with and would like to see improved.
“The [provincial] government wants to fund things that suits their strategy,” says Wagschal. “If you’ll recall, the current provincial government opted out of the carbon tax. So I’m not sure if the current provincial government’s interests are aligned with the current federal government’s. It’s hard to say. But regardless, the federal government did provide us with some funding… and we’re hoping that maybe they’ll provide us with more. We’re hoping.”
The Nova Scotia Department of Advanced Education wrote in a statement to The Coast: “The Department of Advanced Education’s budget includes significant annual funding for Nova Scotia’s ten universities that can be used for operational expenses such as maintenance and infrastructure. As independent, board-run institutions, each university determines how to best invest government funding to run and maintain their facilities.
“Universities are also currently eligible for the following government-funded programs: Sustainable Communities Challenge Fund [a provincial one-time payment of $75,000 to $1 million]; Low Carbon Economy Fund [a federal grant]; Green Municipal Fund as Municipal partner [a Canada-wide grant program for municipal environmental projects]; the Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit [a federal tax credit]; and Efficiency Nova Scotia programs for businesses, non-profits and institutions.”
Owen says that when universities apply for these fundings, “they’re competing against municipalities, hospitals, businesses, Indigenous organizations…so it’s very competitive. Last time I heard, the competition was a lot. Way more people applying for funds than they had funds available. And ourselves and Kings didn’t get any money from those funds. And then there’s the big one, other than Enercan, for buildings is the Low Carbon Economy Fund. And again, you’re competing across the country.”
Owen says Dal is currently in phase two of a four-to-five phase district energy plan that will cost Dal $150 million. Owen has suggestions on how to improve funding for these larger decarbonization projects at the university level in Atlantic Canada.
“We’re planning [to fund our district energy project] over 10 years and without any capital funds, we have to plan that over 20 years… So one thing that would help [is] we’re kind of missing this gap of capital funding for the university sector for major decarbonization, but there’s also opportunities for 0% interest loans. Because, the problem with some of this is, we might have some payback for some [energy efficiency improvements] but we can’t capitalize on it because we can’t take on the debt capacity. So, if the government underwrote it as a 0% loan where it’s not shown as debt, then it’s outside those metrics.
“There’s not an endless supply of loan capacity at universities and colleges, usually they have a debt cap per student, which makes sense financially [because] they’re not going to take on more debt than they have projected revenue for. So, what happens here is we have things like the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is you can do retrofit projects for universities and colleges, however, you still are borrowing at a lower interest rate than, say, the bank’s, but it still doesn’t matter if you have no debt capacity.
“It’s a challenge for universities. Dal has hit it. King’s has hit it, all the colleagues in Atlantic Canada have hit it.
“One thing that that is unique in universities in particular is that we’re not eligible for certain funds that schools are eligible for, hospitals are eligible for and municipalities are eligible for. So, some of the big green capital infrastructure funding through Industry Canada, or the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, is challenging for universities to access because we’re not eligible.
“I’ll say we’re very happy that there are grants out there in federal and provincial [governments]. Some of these grants are very specific. And they’re all in different levels of money. So if you’re trying to do a big district energy project there’s not a fund that’s big enough capital to help you out.”
Apparently for King’s, if your project is too small it might also struggle to find help.
“Let me tell you my strategies,” says Wagschal. “The first strategy was to do the steam to hot water conversion, which is the hardest part of the project because it’s boring. And it’s expensive.
“So the first part costs about $3.5 million. If we could just find government funding for that, then the next two phases are much more interesting. The second phase is to do the retrofits, which would be to make the buildings more energy efficient. And that has a payback. So even though you spend money you can make that money back in the energy you save, so there’s some money in that one that might be interesting, for like a third party, because if they invested the capital, we’d be able to pay them back with the energy savings.
“And then the third piece, which is the sort of most amazing and interesting part, would be to create the big heat pump. And hopefully someone, maybe a donor, or the government, might find that project interesting enough. Because what would happen is that if we were able to get the steam to hot water conversion, the buildings retrofitted and the heat pump, then basically we are ready to be carbon neutral. And we’d be one of the first universities to be carbon neutral.
“And I know $10 million is a lot of money. But in federal terms, it’s actually not. And, you know, we could get there first essentially saying, like, everyone else can do this too, right? Like, this is something that would produce a sustainable future, not just for King’s, but for everybody if we if you kind of follow this model.”
Says Owen: “We need everybody collaborating on the best strategies that are the most efficient, because jumping around to apply for funding is time consuming.”
Evolving technologies cost money to install but can offset risks that inevitably cost more to fix.
“There is a solution to the problems that we have, but we’re gonna need some help to do it. And we could be real leaders. So now I’ve got to be a salesman and try to sell this thing so someone will pay for it.”
Wagschal and Owen both see the futures of their universities as inseparable from large-scale decarbonization. And that takes money.
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This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 5, 2023.