To the Editor:

We applaud the article in your March/April 2008 issue supporting our long experience of profitably reducing pollution. I have led organizations that have invested $2.0 billion in 250 projects serving about 2,000 host facilities. The projects displace more than 50 million tons of CO2 emissions per year, as well as displacing all six criteria pollutants, while saving the hosts more than $400 million per year. These projects are green in both senses of the word, supporting Ginger Wheeler's claims.

However, two additional points should be important to school boards:

First, nearly 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and most of the criteria pollutants originate from the production of heat and power, and local combined heat and power generation doubles efficiency, cutting the pollution in half for the same amount of useful energy. As Ms. Wheeler points out, schools can improve insulation, lighting, ventilation and other processes that use electricity or thermal energy and this should reduce the life cycle costs of the building.

For an even larger savings, consider installing combined heat and power generation that uses one fire to do two jobs. As schools move to ever higher use of space with night classes, weekend events, summer school, etc., the hours of demand for electricity and for heating, cooling and domestic hot water all increase. This improves the payback on a local combined heat and power plant that is sized to produce the base thermal load of the campus.

Many factors are driving electric prices higher, which will pinch all schools' budgets. Spot coal prices have doubled since 1999, while natural gas prices have risen four times in the same period. Since remote electric plants burn three units of fuel to deliver one unit of electricity, the fuel cost increases are multiplied by a factor of three in electric bills.

EPA rules require all power plants east of the Mississippi to reduce criteria pollutant emissions by January 2009, and power plant owners are spending billions to install scrubbers that capture some pollutants, but lower efficiency by adding parasitic loads. Regulatory delay and long-term fuel contracts have stretched out the cost increases for electricity, but not completely. U.S. electric prices have risen 34 percent since 2000 and are confidently predicted to continue rising. This makes local generation that recycles byproduct thermal energy to displace boiler fuel ever more cost effective.

The second point is the availability of third-party energy specialists who will supply their resources — intellectual and financial — to design, build, own and operate highly efficient energy plants in return for a long-term supply contract with the school. School boards often make the mistake of believing that because they can access relatively cheap tax-exempt bonds, the school should build its own energy plant. In our experience, the energy specialist firms, by bringing deep experience in energy to the process, often create significantly more savings than produced by a school-owned design, build and operate process.

School boards can leverage their long-term need for energy services into a contract that uses other people's money and expertise to "green up" the environmental footprint and the budget. Many schools, hospitals and commercial facilities have turned to Energy Service Contractors or ESCOs and profitably reduced their environmental footprint.

Disclaimer: Although our firm builds, owns and operates energy projects, we focus on much larger projects, so this message is not an advertisement, but a suggestion for school boards to consider another option and seek out firms that do focus on school-sized energy savings contracts.

Thomas R. Casten, Chair
Recycled Energy Development LLC
Westmont, Illinois

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