Capacity Constraint

While the carbon charge was aimed at individual buildings and units, most of campus building’s energy operations at Yale are centrally managed by the Office of Facilities. This can result in a tension over where responsibilities lie. One participant said “Facilities thinks they own the building. We think we do.” As the carbon charge increased demand for energy services, the Office of Facilities found it difficult to meet all requests on top of their existing workload. Participants in the pilot noted that if the request was deemed as “not critical”, it could take weeks or even months for the Office of Facilities to take action. For example, the Kroon Hall team submitted a work order to lower thermostat set points over winter break, and came back to find records of high energy consumption as usual. It turned out that the Office of Facilities did not approve the request as they were afraid that the pipe would freeze. However, they did not communicate this to the team, leading to much time and effort spent looking into the cause of continued high energy use. This bottleneck of requests could, at times, lead to frustrating feedbacks, with one participant reflecting “when you don’t have control, the incentives are hollow.” On the other hand, when a building is independently managed like Betts House, participants had greater flexibility to address needs and, in one example, an outside energy service company came just one day after it was called.

There were also technical constraints in engaging with advanced building management systems. Kroon Hall has a building management system that is programmed entirely in German. While the air intake problem was discovered in February, it took until May to address the issue as an energy consultant had to be flown in from Germany to set up the new system.

Discussion Questions:

• What policy change is needed to allow units to use outside contractors?
• Will the capacity constraint issue be reduced if the Yale carbon charge is not revenue-neutral and generates funding to address increased energy service demand?