Annual Sustainability Summit — Video Transcript This transcript is provided for accessibility. The video also includes closed captions. All right, good morning, everyone. We are going to get started. Can everyone hear me? Am I close enough to the mic? Closer. Good morning, can you hear me now? Okay, great, great. So, good morning for the 10th time. I'm Sarah Carson, I serve as Director of the Campus Sustainability Office. And I just wanna welcome you all to the 2025 Sustainable Cornell Summit. We are so excited to have you here. You're all leaders, innovators, and advocates who care deeply about creating a sustainable future. And I'll start us off by reading the land acknowledgement. Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gallocono. The Gallocono are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. And we acknowledge the painful history of Gallocono dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gallocono people, past and present, to these lands and waters. Right. So as we begin, I also want to share a guiding principle from activist and educator Loretta Ross. She reminds us that movements thrive when we focus on the 90% we share and not the 10% that divides us. In her words, we don't have to agree on everything to work together on something. And that's the spirit we want to embrace this morning. So as you engage in sessions and conversations, I invite you to call in and not call out and approach disagreement with curiosity and compassion and celebrate common ground. because I think 90% agreement is pretty powerful. And we're just going to work to build bridges and achieve progress through collaboration today. And speaking of collaboration, those of you who are our STARS subject matter experts, can you just stand up so we can acknowledge and thank you? I know you're out there. There's a bunch. Thank you. So these folks and about 30 others work really hard with our team to make sure we have good data put into our reporting system, and they put in a lot of time and effort, and we really, really appreciate you. Thank you. All right. And before I move us on to the agenda, which you can see presented here, I also just want to make a few announcements about changes to the leadership of the Sustainable Cornell Council. First of all, our co-chair, Dean Lyndon Archer, is cycling off. And in his place, I'm super excited to announce that Dean Ben Holton will be stepping up. And he's here with us this morning. Thank you so much. In addition, Bert Bland has retired. He was our longtime AVP of Energy and Sustainability. And Cole Tucker, our interim AVP, is stepping up to serve as co-chair of the Carbon Neutral Campus Steering Committee. And Cole, where are you? there he is thank you and also Steve Jackson who I will give a more thorough bio of in just a moment professor of information science and science and technology studies as well as the vice provost for academic innovation has stepped up to become the new co-chair of the SCC education and engagement committee taking the place of Catherine Boer who has cycled off and just on On behalf of the whole SEC, I'd like to extend our sincere thanks to Lyndon, Burt, and Catherine for their effective and thoughtful leadership during their terms. And I'll introduce Steve in just a minute, but I want you all, if you have a minute to scan this QR code, if you have your phones with you, this will take you to a Qualtrics survey. And please enter your questions, concerns, and ideas as they occur to you today. We really want to capture those. And it'll be on some slides forthcoming too, but there it is. Okay. So moving on to the main agenda, we're going to start with our State of Campus Sustainability Updates. And Steve Jackson is going to provide those for us. Steve teaches and conducts research in the areas of infrastructure collaboration and institutional change, maintenance, repair, and sustainability, and technology inequality in global development. His work draws on recent research and innovation studies, organizations in the learning sciences, and wider analytic traditions from American pragmatism, history, philosophy, media studies law, and information science subfields, like human-computer interaction and computer -supported cooperative work. He also directs the Computing on Earth Lab, an experimental collaboration that brings together There are social scientists, humanists, artists, and engineers to rethink the material and planetary foundations of computing. All right. I'm just going to switch slides here. I should be using this? Thank you, Sarah. Thank you all. Very happy to be here. I'm glad so many of you can be here, even on a beautifully cold day. I'm a fan of the cold weather. My pond is totally frozen. Skating will happen this weekend. You're all welcome. You're all invited. I want to share a few updates from the campus sustainability effort and then I also want to talk a little bit of a thing at the end that relates to what Sarah was talking about around the computing on earth lab and class in fact that I teach. First congratulations to John Putnam. Does John happen to be here today? This was awarded earlier in the year but I wanted to call out John Putnam, one of our greenhouse growers for their award of the President's Award for Employee Excellence for the Culture of Sustainability. So congratulations, John. I will go through this fairly quickly. For some of you, you've been doing this for a long time. You will be very familiar with this. Some of you may be relatively newer to the structure and operations of the SCC. So here we have the SCC leadership team. One of the important notes, of course, is that we have a new co-leader welcome Ben and thank you again to Lyndon for for his service the sustainable Cornell Council the function of the leadership team is to draw together and oversee many of the activities that are indicated below so those of you who have been involved with our efforts in the past will know we have currently eight focal areas described here climate action living laboratory buildings and energy food land and water purchasing and waste human well-being and transportation and a lot of the engines for getting things done are in fact in the steering these sub steering committees on carbon carbon neutral campus, campus operations and engagement and education. The Council oversees implementation of Cornell's sustainability plan and the climate action plan and it's really in charge of integrating these as core priorities of the university and interfacing and drawing together many of our campus-wide efforts on this. I do want to say the activities of the council are really only, you can think of it as the tip of a much larger iceberg because there are a lot of things happening around campus sort of out in the units, in individual classes, in individual research labs that is at least as important, probably ultimately more important than some of the stuff we're talking about sort of at this top governance level so there's an emphasis within the council on harnessing academic excellence in research and in teaching there's a strong interest in movement towards the living laboratory concept how do we think of the campus as a place that can enact and demonstrate some of the changes that we might want to see in the world at large and of course we work in partnership in all things and across across with on campus and off -campus partners so the SEC leadership team Rick and and Ben here are Rick our continuing leader then our new leader in this area and that's the membership there they oversee many of the things I just described the Education Engagement Steering Committee which I've just joined I've been part of this directly part of this since earlier in the fall so other than Ben maybe I'm probably the second newest person I guess in some ways at the SCC and I want to call out some highlights from the important work of the committee this year so we launched the sixth version of the mission sustainability course this summer and over the course of its history there have been now 20,000 students taking this intro to sustainability at Cornell course and a A lot of this work in the original design and the redesign has benefited from the contributions of a partner course, English 3795, Communicating Climate Change Course. So students have played an active role in shaping a version of this that they think is gonna work for other students. The Climate Change Curriculum Working Group has been hard at work. They've been partnering with the Center for Teaching Innovation to help instructors design climate-focused curricular changes in their courses there's a five-week learning community the next that involves instructors who want to do this the next versions of this are in May and in June of 2026 there's a 90-minute workshop that CTI is partnering with the Johnson Art Museum in January this coming January there's been work with the registrar to pull together a database of courses with sustainability and climate change focus so that students who want to go in this direction can more easily see what's available to them. Sometimes it's hard for students to see, especially beyond their major and beyond their college, and this is really an effort to make the possibilities in these areas more transparent to them. And then some really important survey work from the committee in this past summer, in August 2025, there was a survey given to, it looks like about 325 students from the intro to oceanography course which was about their their attitudes their feelings their concerns their interest in additional information and teaching about climate that is being taken as or was is a pilot for a larger survey effort that we hope to go out to campus early in the coming semester oops let me get out of the oh should be using my clicker I guess all right and then we have the s the campus operations steering committee co-led by Rick and Pat Wynn back here hi Pat and I'm not gonna say a lot about this because I think of the next speaker coming up knows a lot more about this and we'll be updating a lot of us on a lot of the activities of that group. And then the Campus Neutral Steering Committee is co-chaired by Cole Tucker and Ben Holton, and we will also be hearing a little bit more about this work in the coming speaker. I want to announce that the Sustainability Dashboard is recently launched. this is an effort to make current data on sustainability that's coming in through our various instruments more accessible I went up a few days ago as I understand is that correct so please do take a look at that you can see some of the categories there dive in take a look it's a first launch if you have thoughts send them send them our way but that is available for you to look at as well you You will have seen by announcement some of the recent STARS ratings that Cornell has been... Oh, that's not me. I thought it was me, it's somebody else. You can see where Cornell has come out in the recent STARS ratings. For those not familiar, STARS is the rating system associated with AESHE, the Association AESHE... Can somebody give me the... Oh, there we go. So Association of Sustainability and Higher Education. And you can see that by STARS ratings, we do quite well on curriculum and research, campus and public engagement. Operations, we're a little bit lower for reasons that we can talk about, planning administration and innovation. There's a much longer breakdown that we could look at here. I'm not gonna talk through in great detail. You can see the bars across. Cornell is red. The orange is the top Ivy Peer, Ivy Plus Peer in that category. And the grayed out box is the average. So you'll see, you know, we're coming and we're not at the top in almost any of these categories, except on the engagement side, we come out quite well. And sometimes we're ahead of our peers, sometimes we're a little bit behind our peers. The way I read this is there's ongoing work, there's more stuff we can be doing, there's more effort we can make and are making. And that's where you can of course read much more about this, where we land. Some of the areas I think in particular that we could do more in or we could think of as areas of opportunity are around storm water management efforts in campus fleet right so as we turn over our campus fleet what are the opportunities for bringing in more sustainable operations and options more we can do in employee education and engagement so currently we have 50 to 75 percent roughly of our non-academic staff participate in sustainability professional development and training on an annual basis. Cornell Dining has done a lot. Cornell in Building Care has done a lot. There's probably more we can continue to do on that. And then sustainable computing is another area. Sustainable commuting, sorry, is another area that we can do more in as well. All right, I'm gonna close by saying a couple of things. an area that I do a lot of work in and that we think will become more central to our efforts. We're working to make more central to our efforts going ahead. So this is just a slide I sometimes show when I'm out talking in the world to other groups. This is from a class I teach in a research lab that I lead called the Computing on Earth Lab and the Computing on Earth class, which is all around the planetary dimensions and consequences of computing. When I teach the class, I don't know if there are any veterans of the class here, but when I teach the class, we look at questions of sourcing and extraction. So for example, the picture on the left is tin mining in Banka and Belitung in Indonesia, where the majority of the solder that's used in the devices you have in your pocket today comes from. Questions of energy and water. People might recognize this image in the middle as the greenage Bitcoin power plant over on Seneca Lake. We've been doing some work looking at that climate effects of that air effects of that and then finally a really important question that I think sometimes gets left out around waste and repair so the images on the right are actually from Gates Hall or a Bower's CIS repair fair that we've run for several years now and over the course of running those we've now successfully fixed and returned to operation several hundred computers laptops and desktops which are then donated out into the world we work in close partnership with groups in the community and around around the country and in fact around the world and a special shout out to the Cornell Computer Reuse Association a fantastic student group who's been doing this work for a very long time and in very interesting ways one of the points I want to make to you today in this work and in our work is the importance of thinking these things together so for example one observation when we think about energy and water usage is how these things connect to other parts of the of the three-way set up here so sourcing and extraction waste and repair so a computer device a laptop or a phone unlike a building something like 80 to 85 percent of the carbon is in the phone the moment it walks out the door right that's the embodied versus the operational carbon sometimes in buildings people will estimate it more 50 50 because buildings are amortized over a much longer lifetime in a phone most of the climate damage if you want is done at the moment of production there's about 80 kilograms uh of carbon in each phone by some by some stats uh there's a really interesting project this is actually a student project that came out of my class a couple years ago but it was a a really smart nutrition nutritional science student who said you know we need we need nutrition labels for iPhones so they came up with these really beautiful now totally faded now you can barely read it I've been carrying it around so long nutrition labels to help people understand what's in the phone so there's there's about 100 liters of water in this phone which is pretty remarkable because it's a pretty small device 50 of that comes in the in the mining the extraction 50 50 of that comes in the processing um so one uh one question i sometimes get because i teach in this area is what is the most sustainable phone or what is the most sustainable laptop what those numbers mean is that the most sustainable phone is almost always the one that's already in your pocket right there is no better there's not nothing better you can do you can't buy a greener phone that is more effective than keeping your current phone running and that's actually part of the interest in in waste and repair sometimes I sum up the class when I introduce it to students I just say look all you need to know about this class is that computing is not a cloud right we have these metaphors of computing that suggests that it's dematerialized that it's somehow only virtual that somehow only information floating out there but computing is as material and as physical as anything else on campus and as anything else we'll talk about in sustainability circles. So this is something that we've been trying to think about and bring into our work a little bit more. What I hope we can do in the coming months is add computing as a focus area. So I mentioned the eight focal areas earlier. I would love it if by the summer we had nine and we had some useful metrics and information around computing. We've been working with people in CIT and operations around tracking, computing -specific energy and water usage. So far, the way we've done our reporting, those things are buried and sort of wrapped into wider facilities reporting, but I think we're working on ways to kind of calling that out more transparently. We've been working on e-waste reporting and mitigation strategies, so extending product life cycles. and the the bookstore has been enhancing its repair operations now for several years the Cornell Computer Reuse Association which I already mentioned and finally AI education and awareness I know this is an important concern it's an important concern to me and there's a variety of efforts we can make in that area that I think would fall naturally under this this working group should we establish it we are making some additional direct already we have a gen AI critical literacy program that the Center for teaching innovation and the library have been working up it'll be piloting in January to a few courses in the spring and then it'll be it's meant to be available to all incoming students starting next summer there's some really interesting work I think we can borrow around AI footprint calculators so helping students and faculty and users to understand this point that computing is not a cloud and what the implications are of when they when they prompt to share some some stats that I think are interesting and that we might bring into our we are bringing into some of our education campaigns the I mentioned the point about extending the lifespan of devices and by one estimate if everyone in the US extended their phone use by one year, that's the equivalent of taking 600,000 cars off the road. That is not a small number. That is actually a pretty large number. That's a meaningful number. On the AI question, people may know that AI searches are about five times as energy intensive as a standard search, and that's only for a simple prompt. If you have a more complicated prompt, it rapidly escalates beyond that we know that data AI data centers are even by the standards of data centers as a whole AI data centers mostly because of the underlying energy grids that they tend to run on in sort of the mid-Atlantic area tend to be more carbon intensive than your average power grid and then finally people will have probably seen stats like this data centers as a share of demand on U.S. electricity is estimated right now at four to five percent of the overall grid load but it's expected by some measures to grow to 10 to 12 percent in a very short order maybe by 2030 right so this is a dynamic space we are looking at peers we have not found peers actually that are doing this very well honestly yet but so I think this is an opportunity for us to lead We are drawing on research around the metrication and questions of measure. There are challenges of transparency in the industry, too, which challenge some of those efforts. There's certainly a lot more to be done in the area of education. One of the questions I get sometimes from students is, well, how should I think about AI use, and when is it worth it, and when is it not worth it? And I'm reminded of something I learned from a plastics activist once, who was asked the question about, should we just ban plastic, right? That was a question that was put to them, a very critical activist. And they said, well, I don't think we want to ban plastics. I think plastics in pacemakers, it's a really good use of plastic. That's a worth it use of plastic. Plastic bags at the grocery store, not worth it. So it could be that as we think towards our AI efforts, we become more judicious users of these things, more thoughtful users of these things. and we tend towards the high value uses of these things to support our work in various ways and our learning and our research but maybe we move a little bit away from the plastic bag version of AI use of which I think there are many right now all right apologies for that slightly long rant what I will say is that if you are interested in this specifically feel free to reach out to students in particular if you want to get involved in this work please let work faculty of course as well please reach out and I'm happy to talk more thank you so much Steve it was wonderful right next up it is my great pleasure to introduce to you today's keynote speaker Rana Mukherjee is an industry leader and one of the top global experts in wholesale electricity market design Rana founded Ludin Energy Analytics to provide cutting -edge electricity market analytics and advisory services to help companies succeed in a rapidly changing electricity market landscape. From 2006 to 2024, Rana was the senior vice president of market structures for the New York Independent System Operator, fondly known as the New York ISO, where he laid the building blocks for the next generation of electric markets. These building blocks include adapting market designs and infrastructure to accommodate high levels of renewable energy, integrating energy storage and incorporating distributed resources in the markets. Before joining the New York ISO, he served as Vice President and General Manager and Group Senior Vice President at ABB, where he had global responsibility for ABB's Power Technology Asset Management and Consulting Services, and he served as General Manager of GE's Power Systems Energy Consulting business and helped establish the GE Maps software as an industry standard tool for evaluating competitive power markets. Needless to say, he's an expert, and I'm super excited to hear what he has to say today. Thanks, Rana. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be in corner. I used to come here a lot when I worked for the New York ISO, and one of your faculty members, Richard Schuller, was on our board. But I haven't been here for about 10 years, so it's a pleasure to be back. And I'm working a little bit with Cole's sustainability group with Sarah and Stacey. So I'm hoping to make more trips and engaging with this community. So thank you for inviting me to be the keynote on this Cornell Sustainability Symposium. I'll make two observations. One is sustainability means decarbonization. and decarbonization is a global problem. And decarbonization, Cornell getting 100% carbon-free doesn't solve global warming. But your leadership in sustainability and decarbonization shows the way. So I think that your leadership and your commitment to this for universities and also New York State is a leader in energy transition and sustainability decarbonization the whole idea this is that this is a very existential issue and and and for us is to show the way to show that this can be done to develop the technologies to make sure it's scalable so so that is one the other one is that the key to decarbonization is through electricity electricity is the key to decarbonization because you electrify what's happening is electrification of transportation is happening electrification of heating is happening electrification of industries happening so we have to be razor focused on electricity I joined this industry like I was an electric power engineering student many many moons ago and they thought it was the deadest dullest field to join so it took me 40 years to be cool and hip on on the cutting edge so so with that I retired from the New York ISO in December 31st last year and I've kind of playing around with some stochastic modeling to to do decarbonization more effectively so that is what I'm doing as post -retirement but but what I'm going to tell tell you is my perspectives I've learned from the New York ISO in the last 18 years when I ran the markets group there so a little perspective about the grid and again gives you perspective on what you're doing here in Cornell as part of the broader New York grid and what happens in the grid absolutely affects you and to give you a little more perspective of what the New York is doing and what the New York grid looks like and how it's evolving so New York as you see is a state it's very interesting because what's what's interesting about New York is it has a New York City New York City's we call it the infinite sink of electrons and as to go to PJM PJM was six times bigger than New York City and I bought the VP of markets to up on the you know the top of the MetLife building and say that this ain't Philadelphia you know just look around because we you can be six times our size but this is much more important we cannot let New York City go black so the other thing is that two -thirds of the demand in New York the New York, the peak demand is about 30 gigs. About two-third of it is Albany South, Lower Hudson Valley, New York. It's really New York City, Long Island, Westchester. That's where two-thirds of the demand is. So all the electrons want to go from the western New York, northern New York, into New York City. In fact, every electron from New England and New Jersey also wants to go to New York City. So one of the things that have happened, And in fact, New Jersey and New England both built HVDC ties into New York City and Long Island to a little bit of their chagrin because PGM is to say, we build these 500 kV networks and you build straws and take out electrons. But one of the facets of that is New York State has been chronically, hasn't built out its transmission system in the last 40 years. only recently has it's had it started building out if yeah oops trying to get the pointer going here okay here it is so New York City because all the load is here in the southern part a lot of the generation especially renewables is in the west and in the north to get renewable energy into New York City you have to build a transmission in the past there was less transmission built because for two things one is New York is really two states upstate and downstate upstate if you build generation that gets sucked into the upstate people generation it goes downstate you get the ugly wires your price goes up all the electrons go to downstate New York City didn't really want to buy too much trans generation from upstate because they wanted generation close to New York City to prevent blackouts the blackouts in 65 71 was all due to transmission outages. So they would rather, for reliability, they would rather have generation close by. Now, that has changed when you go to decarbonize and you want to go renewable. You have to build, the renewable energy is not going to build in New York City, Long Island. They're building a lot of offshore wind, but a lot of the generation, renewable generation, will be in northern New York and southern, in western New York. So you have to build transmission. So there are a lot of projects being built through public policy transmission. One of the first ones which was built was Western New York transmission. There is the AC transmission, and there are stuff to connect the offshore wind. A little bit of perspective closer to home on the Western transmission. This was not built because of new sources. It was built to free up the Niagara, the existing resources, because two large coal plants, Huntley and Dunkirk, retired. It changed the flows, so you had to build upgrades to get the existing hydro out of the Buffalo area. So that's the perspective of the New York system. things to remember is out of 30 gigs 20 gigs plus is downstate and the transmission it flows from west to south and and also not to south so and all the renewables are primarily in the all locating in western and northern New York and of course there's offshore wind now in terms of in terms of mix of generation there's again an upstate and downstate. Upstate is very very clean upstate is 94 upstate is 91 percent clean because there is a lot of hydro there's a lot of wind there's a lot of solar in fact if you look at New York State itself it's quite good it's 50 percent carbon -free because of the hydro and the nuclear wind and solar is about only five or six percent now that But to get to 70% and 100%, you have to build many gigawatts of wind and solar. Because 100 megawatts of a power plant is replaced typically by 300 or 400 megawatts of solar and wind to get the same amount of energy. And also you have to deal with intermittency of wind and solar. But if you look at upstate, upstate is 91% green, and the downstate is equally bad. they are like 96% fossil. So for the state to get from 50% to 70% and then to 100% you have to build a lot of wind and a lot of solar and a lot of storage. So that is that is part of the New York State Energy Plan. The other thing is that New York State used to have a lot of surplus. When the New York ISO market started in 1999 there was about 10 ,000 megawatts of surplus if the demand was 30 they had like 40 and they have a margin that they keep about 20 percent but they had another seven eight thousand megawatts of generation all of that has eroded some of it through because of the state has very strict environmental rules all the oil plants at two efficiency the the increases the oil plants and the coal plants have retired a lot of the oil and efficient gas plants are retired too so we are at the razor edge really we have only a couple of thousand megawatts more than is needed some of it is also this this this top part of here is imports and the bottom part is demand response so if you look at what they call iron on the ground it's just about enough to meet demand so we have there's one of the things that the the state is very concerned and the new york is concerned is keeping the lights on because if you retire a big power plant and the state would want to retire more power plants because of getting rid of fossil and adding renewables you will get into a reliability issue the other thing is growth of AI data centers Bitcoin mining green hydrogen is adding a lot of demand so reliability is foremost on the mind of the regulators and ISO so now what does the load shape look like this interesting New York you have all heard the duck curve of California California here the load is starts off and then it just drops precipitously in the middle of the day oops oops oops what did I do sticky finger all right so it drops precipitously in the middle of the day because the solar comes on. So that is the duck curve. New York doesn't have a duck curve. I call it the platypus curve. New York is flatter because it doesn't have that amount of solar yet. New York has about 10,000 megawatts of solar. It's not not where California has few orders of magnitude more of solar. The other one is California is a very thin state. It's if you build a control area you don't build one which is skinny and just goes north to south. New York is from between Montauk and Buffalo there's a the Sun is shining somewhere for the next with a couple of hours so we don't have as much solar and we are not as skinny as California so we don't have a duck curve yet but what is interesting is the summer peak this is the typical summer day it's about 22,000 22 gigawatts high The peak can be 33 or so. So you see that we build a lot of assets for a peak day, a couple of months, a few hours a month. So if you look at assets, how much it costs to build a gas plant, like $500 per kW or more, you are building 10,000-plus megawatts just for a few peak days. and a lot of it is driven by air conditioning load in the summer so winter peak if you look at the winter peak the winter peak is about 10,000 megawatts lower than the summer peak and this is a typical summer day which is 22,000 megawatts the peak summer day when it's 100 degrees in New York it could be 33 so you build a lot of assets 10,000 12,000 megawatts of installed capacity just to serve a few days and a few hours so the capacity utilization of the electric power industry is terrible so anything that can be done to shift to make the loads more flexible through storage to a demand response through and and it is you you can have buildings be flexible you can have air conditioning be flexible you can have industry be flexible so creating this the the capacity factor of the fleet goes a long way to to be more efficient to be more sustainable and what's happening is that the demand is growing and the demand is growing through a few things because of electrification of heat electrification of transportation and again very lumpy loads of AI and data centers and so on So there are different scenarios for that. There's a low one, baseline, and high demand scenario. And that is, it's a balancing act of how much transmission is built, how much resources are added, and where they are located. The other thing that's happening is as New York transitions to heating through electricity, the peak will not happen in winter, in summer anymore. It will transition to winter. Because today, New York is a summer peaking system because the peaking is driven by air conditioning. In mid-2030s, as you get more and more heat bombs, it is projected the winter peak will exceed the summer peak. Now, Hydro-Quebec is always winter peaking because now New York is going to become more like Hydro-Quebec. So that has consequences on what kind of resources we build where. For example, Hydro -Quebec sells a lot of energy to New York in the summer. They keep it in the winter. If we become winter peaking, then there'll be no, we cannot depend on Hydro-Quebec energy. And so there are consequences to be thought about for going to a winter peak. And all the winter peak is driven by heating, mostly, so you have to see how much flexibility you can build in how much load shifting you can do so yeah so this is what I was saying there's a lot of the winter peaking is based on based on the building and Evie loads the summer is muted because the summer the building electrification is a lot less and I wondered for a little bit why and then the what happens is the summer electrification is already the summer air conditioning load is already there in the winter the heat pump load just kicks in higher than the air conditioning load we already have in the summer so that's that's what happens now here's the one that is causing a lot of angst to the system planners of the ISO the big lumpy loads you have you have lots of data forms high green hydrogen bitcoin mining show not shows showing up 2024 there was some 2025 this is a nice so power trends it shows more but it also becomes less definite they had very definitive definitive sites here people don't know where they're going to locate and how much going to be located could be could be a lot could be little and the wholesale market markets also struggle with that because markets need some definition as to as to where the grid is going but markets provide transparency provides objective clearing of market non -discriminatory clearing of markets it gives you a lot of a lot of transparency and efficiency I will skip through one of the things that markets has done over 20 years is have a lot of environmental benefits. It has driven SOCs and NOFs almost down to zero, 99% improvement. The trajectory for carbon because of markets, what markets does is that drives out inefficient units. So a lot of the coal and the gas and the oil retired replaced by combined cycle which was more efficient. Now you'll see a bump here, the bump here was after retirement of the nuclear unit, Indian Point. So when Indian Point retired, it jumped up and is now coming down again because of adding up renewables. So now we have to get this carbon down a lot more, and especially to zero if it's going to be net zero. So one useful metric is the marginal emission rate. Now upstate is 91% renewable, but what's on the margin you still have some gas in upstate so sometimes there is there is the gas plants the marginal one is if you add a megawatt of load what supplies it a lot of times it's though we are 99 91 percent on average renewables upstate you can still have a gas unit supplying your next demand so if you add demand what's going to supply it is it going to be for a wind farm or solar farm or is it going to be a gas unit so that marginal emission rate is very important New York City has a local law 97 which is looking at build the carbon emission profile of buildings I know in Cornell you're also looking at marginal emission rates and how you decarbonize the campus so this is something that I'm actually working with in the Anderson lab Lindsay Anderson on the modeling of that that includes the forecasting of how the grid will build out how much of these lumpy loads will come in how much of the wind will be built how much of solar will be built how much storage will be built so it's a very important function very quickly on this on the on the policy side New York State is on the bleeding edge it used to be California was on the really the bleeding as New York has joined California with very ambitious targets and one of the things they wanted New York State wants to do is to drive it to 70% renewable by 2030 they revise it to 2033 acknowledging some of the delays in the wind offshore wind they would still want to do 100% renewable 100% carbon-free grid by 2040 and 85% greenhouse gas reduction by 2050 very ambitious stuff one of the things they've acknowledged is this thing called defers this you cannot get 2030 you can't get there because we have 50 today but if you build a lot of wind and solar we can get 70% renewable if to get 200% what do you have to do is you just cannot do that by building four-hour storage and wind and solar you need something which is called dispatchable emission free resources which would be like you can call it a carbon free resources on demand for multiple hours for long duration this is the time when the Sun is not shining for because it's cloudy for for days the wind is not blowing for a week for some reason there's a doldrum and you need these resources and because of that these resources will run only a few hours they can run less than hundred hours a year but you need to keep a lot of it is like almost like all the gas turbines need to be retained unless you get something like running these same gas turbines with hydrogen or renewable natural gas or small modular reactors so that is a to get to 100% and this is unproven technology so how do you get how do you get there with other thing that can reduce the need for these defers our flexibility and demand so that is something that should be foremost quickly so this is the state targets they have 6,000 megawatts of solar 10 ,000 distributed the state wants to build up to 30 gigs of solar nine of offshore longer-term goal is nine of storage as a nine of onshore as well to get to that 2040 scenario so there are a lot of renewables to be built but what has happened in between here is that the federal we have gone from clean new deal to energy dominance which really is biased towards fossil in fact all the incentives for green is being taken away of all the offshore wind is is essentially there's no other for offshore wind is is being being permitted even the onshore one has created greater scrutiny so New York State is operating under a very hostile federal environment New York State is one of the things they can do they're doubling down on solar because solar they can build rooftop and others they've acknowledged that the offshore wind they have three wind two permitted major wind plant the off of Long Island Sound one already connected they don't foresee more to be permitted and and and new york has adopted more more all of the above with a bias towards renewable federal is energy dominance with not with biased against the renewables and we are we are living in that environment while new york state tries to decarbonize while carnell tries to decarbonize and one of the consequences has been that some of these transmission projects which were built to build renewables two of them the project to to bring offshore wind into Long Island is okay a major project was to build upgrade transmission to build 4,000 megawatts of offshore wind into New York City that has been shelved there's another project which was to build renewables from on land wind and solar from upstate down to New York City that has been shelved too because that was mass and it was they don't feel that they'll get permits for that so federal policies affecting New York State's execution of the energy plan so in in summary we are we are we in a New York State and is is is very committed to transitioning to green New York State is already quite clean 50% carbon-free getting to 70% is doable getting to 100% is challenging and again I'll go back to but for New York State and also for Cornell showing the way is imperative because it is an existential existential issue, decarbonization, getting rid of carbon, and you have to be razor focused on electricity because electricity is the key to decarbonization. So I know I'm pretty much on time, but I would take a couple of questions quickly. Thank you. That was wonderful, good information. Some of it really hard to hear, but thank you so much. I think in the interest of staying on schedule, we're going to move to our break, get some more snacks, some more coffee, bathroom break. We'll resume here at 10, and I believe Rana is going to be around, so if you have questions, please use that QR code, and we'll do our best to sort those out and maybe you can catch Rana on the break or during the poster session as well. So five minutes. I just want to take one moment to first express my appreciation to everyone who has come together to put this event on, all the organizers and staff and crew that have seen us. Thanks for everybody's hard work pulling this together. Thank you. for your very thought-provoking remarks and bringing up some of the challenges that lie before us. In the immortal words of Po from Kung Fu Panda, there's no secret ingredient, right? There's no magical silver bullet that's gonna suspend the second law of thermodynamics, give us a perpetual motion or energy machine, and make this all easy. It really involves a lot of hard work, there are different technologies, each with their trade-offs, their pros and cons. We have a very sophisticated and very mature energy system on campus right now that is optimized for a certain set of conditions and now those conditions are changing for good reasons but they're changing and so we got to figure out how to get from here to a future end state with an acceptable balance of the pros and cons one that we can live with as a university and we can get our mission done that we can live with as a community and we can live with within the policy framework in the state of New York and here in the United States so that's no small challenge for us to take on so you're going to hear from a lot of the best minds that we have on campus that are working on this and I would actually maybe challenge Poe a little bit and say there is a secret ingredient and that is the smarts of the folks in the Cornell community so thank you very very much for being here and we look forward to the rest of the presentation now I'll turn it over to Meredith and then picking us off in the back there. All right, so our first speaker is Jamie Wilson to talk about our drivers for decarberation. So I'm Jamie Wilson, I'm an energy sustainability engineer in the facilities engineering department here at Cornell. And one thing about big red, utilities, reliability, and transition, there's a lot of acronyms. So if you want to learn more about acronyms, this is the place to come. We're going to start with Cornell's Climate Action Plan, CAP. So Cornell set ambitious goals to address climate change, starting with our foundational 2007 carbon commitment and 2009 climate action plan, which you can find on our website. So Cornell's website is a living document with a series of published updates, supplemental reports, because, as Rick Burgess says, everything just keeps changing. So we have an evolving and ever-changing landscape of energy technologies and regulatory policies. And that's at the local, state, and federal level that we've seen just from Rana's talk this morning. So another policy is that CLCPA, the Climate Law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. And that is also impacting Cornell's planning and decision-making. So you've seen a little bit from Rana with a quick preview. It's setting to achieve an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 for the state level. and there's a vision of how we can transition to a clean energy economy through the lens of both New York's 2022 scoping plan as well as an upcoming New York energy plan that has a draft out in 2025 as expected in 2026. So with these ambitious laws, they have the role to establish regulations and greenhouse gas emission reduction mandates. So come visit me to learn more about these different regulations and all the new acronyms like DEEVER, NICI, UTENJA, and more. David's going to tell us about our greenhouse gas inventory. Good morning, I'm David Frostbott with Facilities Engineering. Cornell, like hundreds of other educational institutions, is a signatory with Second Nature, and as part of that we annually prepare greenhouse gas inventory. We do that covering the three scopes, scope one which is fossil on-site fossil fuels, scope two which is purchase electric, and under scope three that's commuting and air travel. We follow the World Resources Institute of GHG accounting protocol, that's the global accounting standard for doing this kind of work. In addition, we also have a title by permit, so we also do required regulatory reporting that includes greenhouse gases. And finally, the hot news is the DEC recently finalized their mandatory greenhouse gas reporting. The first report will be June 2027. That's a CLCPA-driven reporting, which will utilize a different methodology with a focus on upstream and applying a 20-year total working potential. I'd like to talk about district energy. Good morning, everybody. I'm Cole Tucker. I'm the Interim Associate Vice President for Energy and Sustainability. And today, I'm very happy to talk to you all about district energy. We at Cornell own and operate a district energy system, producing and distributing steam, chill water, and electric to all the buildings on campus. We've been doing this for 150 years. if you can believe it. Started out with wooden encased steam distribution piping, which sounds crazy to me now. But we still do it today at a pretty significant scale. 150 buildings, about 14 million square feet. Now the key to district energy is that none of those buildings have boilers or chillers in them. We handle all the production centrally with our combined heat and power plant and then lake source cooling. Now this kind of situation has several benefits, But three of the core ones that I'll point out is affordability, efficiency, and reliability. And when I say reliability, I'm talking 99.9 % and up time for all of our utilities assets. Those qualities, when we think about a decarbonized state, are core to make sure we carry forward into that new system. District energy has to be part of how we decarbonize. It's going to make us do it better and faster. And if you want to hear about cool things like how I can take heat from buildings that don't need it and give it to buildings that do come see me if you're very interested in how I can push a button to handle load management on campus to meet some kind of tremendous grid condition come talk to me we're very excited I'd like to have you today. All right, and then Sam's going to talk to us about the Energy Conservation Initiative. All right, good morning, everyone. My name is Sam Fairchild. I'm an energy engineer in Cornell's Utilities and Energy Management Department. I'm currently managing our Energy Conservation Initiative, commonly referred to as our ECI program. It's through this program, as well as through advancements in our district energy systems and collaboration with campus partners and living lab partners that Cornell has been able to achieve a 15% reduction in annual energy consumption despite considerable growth of campus in order of several million square feet. So the ECI program was launched in 2000 and it significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions and operating costs of all of our buildings on campus and as well as university-owned buildings. The program is led by a team of dedicated energy professionals, including energy engineers, technicians, and primarily focuses on efficiency upgrades within campus buildings in three core areas. Those are heat recovery technologies, implementation of controls upgrades that improves the operation of our HVAC systems, as well as upgrades to our lighting systems throughout campus. So as of October 2025 our ECI program has invested 48 million dollars and returned energy cost savings of 89 million dollars just over the past decade alone. That is equivalent to 4 .1 trillion BTUs energy save which actually surpasses the annual energy consumption of our central utilities plan. So if you have additional questions and want to learn more about you know some of the more recent wins of the ECI program please come find me at our poster session. Thank you. And Matt's going to talk to us about building energy standards. Good morning everyone. I'm Matt Kozlowski. I'm with Cornell's facilities engineering department. I wanted to talk to you today about the Cornell design and construction standards. The design and construction standards are pretty wide-ranging. What they are is a series of standards that are prepared and are actually enforceable through contracts for designers, architects that are working on projects on campus. So these typically are applied to new construction and significant renovation projects. Today I want to talk a little bit about our energy efficiency and sustainable design standard. Really what this does is help our new construction projects prepare for the energy transition. So, you know, these are things like low temperature hot water design, building commissioning to make sure that these complex systems that we're installing are operating correctly, readiness for renewable energy things of this nature yep and so we look at these and we set these up tiered on project cost so again looking at lower value lower complexity projects having slightly lower requirements up to our most stringent requirements for projects that exceed 10 million dollars so if you'd like to learn more about our sustainable design standards please feel feel free to come out over and chat with me. Thanks. All right, and Chaz is going to talk to us about steam to hot water conversion. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Chaz Porter, Cornell's energy piping distribution manager. So I'm in charge of everything underground in between the production plants and out-to-end users and doing, so that key link between where we make it to where we use it. Cornell is transforming its central steam system into a high efficiency hot water network, cutting heat distribution losses and dramatically boosting reliability and performance across campus. This is a carefully choreographed undertaking. We are driven by a master plan that we're kind of guiding us through this right now. We're about 20% complete in this conversion. It's aligning with building renovations and new construction across campus right now, So we're trying to eliminate a lot of the down time that some of these buildings are seeing and all the up time for our new efficiency projects And it's accelerating this decarbonization momentum that we're trying to go for We have a dedicated 24-7 365 utilities distribution team that maintains currently right now 22 miles of steam line and condensate lines coming back to the plant We have 24 miles of chill water line coming up from our lake source cooling up to central campus and around We currently have about four miles of hot water lines adding every year to that so kind of you can get a little screenshot of what we've got going on. This is a very tough undertaking to maintain. There's a lot of underground piping, a lot of old buildings, a lot of new infrastructure, a lot of construction going on and a lot of critical research and facilities that we're trying to keep warm and cool all year round. Campus-wide upgrades are replacing this infrastructure with modern, safer, more thermally efficient piping as well, too, and mechanicals, reducing maintenance risk for workers, and it's also lowering our annual operating costs. Strategic renewal of this aging steam piping, upgraded insulation and installation of high efficiency heat exchangers and mechanicals have reduced thermal losses, expanded system capability and capacities and it's enhancing longevity and resilience across campus the steam to hot water conversion is essential for interconnecting the renewable heat and decarbonizing campus which we'll hear more about as we go through these lightning rounds this connection will ensure a fossil future fossil free for for us and with technologies like our resource heat that we're using and also renewable technologies that we haven't even touched on yet. So if you'd like to learn more about some of our vast underground infrastructure, come see me. Now Josh is going to tell us about Combined Heat and Town. Good morning. My name is Josh Lopena and I'm Cornell's Director of Utilities Production. So I get the unique privilege to maintain and operate Cornell's Combined Heat and Power Plant. Cornell's Combined Heat and Power Plant, or CHP, was a major investment by Cornell in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. When it was built in 2009, we turned our backs on burning coal forever, we switched to national gas, and we reduced our CO2 emissions by over 40% practically overnight. There are thousands of CHP plants in operation in the United States, and they play an important role in bridging the gap between coal and the next generation of renewable heating and power. Cornell's combined power plant captures heat normally wasted in the combustion process, producing electricity and usable heat together at over 70 percent efficiency, roughly double that of open cycle power plants currently feeding our electric grid. If you're interested in understanding why so many of these plants exist today, and how they are operated to maximize production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, please visit my poster and let's talk about it talk to us about lake source cooling thank you it's my pleasure to be here today I retired from Cornell as director of utilities and energy management and during my career had the opportunity to lead teams in creating lake source cooling mining power and energy conservation initiative so it's very fun to be helping think about the new future for utilities at Cornell but early back in the 1990s I had the responsibility for the chill water utility a major change and renewal were needed thanks to low-growth aging equipment and the Montreal Protocol which was banning refrigerants that were the working fluids and all of our refrigeration machines and the chill water system and lastly our rising environmental awareness of energy use and its impacts sounds kind of familiar today right we have big challenges the lake source cooling began as an idea in 1994 to replace that chiller technology and after many years of investigation and outreach engineering and permitting it was approved by the University and the significantly higher capital cost was shown by modeling to be at least equivalent to the long-term rate of return of the endowment of the University that was our metric for success the trustees wouldn't approve spending extra capital if it didn't meet or exceed the endowments rate of return. This year we celebrated our 25th anniversary of operation which is quite quite amazing for me. So lake source cooling replaced the chillers that we had with with high electricity use and replaced it with renewable energy using renewable cooling from the deep cold waters of nearby Cuba Lake. We use the lake as a heat sink saving over 85 % of the previous energy that was used by those refrigeration machines and overall campus electricity use dropped by ten percent forever. So the campus chilled water and cold water from the lake never mix, they just come nearby each other and heat exchangers and the equivalent of about two hours of heat is added to the lake every year with lake source cooling. The project included significant community benefits and input and direct benefits to the community was over two million dollars of neat things like cooling at Ethic High School among others. Analysis during operation and permit renewals has shown that the project clearly does provide a benefit without harmful impact on Cuba Lake which is something that was a concern and a primary focus for us right from the beginning. If you're interested in finding out what it took to get lake source cooling created and what it's been like to operate it for 25 years, come by, and we'll chat at our poster. We're going to talk to us about renewable electricity. Thanks, Meredith. Okay, show of hands. After hearing Ron and everybody else, who thinks clean electric grid is essential for achieving our carbon goals? Yeah, no brainer. Me too. Yeah, so clearly meeting growing loads with 100% clean power requires a massive build out, right, of utility, distributed, and renewable storage and transmission all across the state. Our campus goal is to catalyze development of enough new generation assets in New York to match our campus consumption. We're about 20% of the way there based on current campus usage, and we have made critical contributions to the industry along the way. We've initiated changes in state policy, tariffs, the way utilities interpret those tariffs, interconnection rules, and we also kick-started New York's solar grazing industry. However, choices in electrification of heat, other new lows, think AI, or I don't know, maybe they do something fun and new at the particle accelerator that takes more power, could double our annual campus consumption and increase our campus peak maybe six-fold. And unfortunately, New York is collectively behind on grid transformation, offshore wind, and we're only at about 1% energy storage, about 8% towards those 2030 goals. Only distributed solar is on track. And our story is much like the state. We were able to build out on all of the distributed scale solar sites on Cornell or the land that had anything approaching or reasonable interconnect opportunity. But we also need utility scale projects to meet our goals. And we have struggled to bring this to fruition despite significant effort. So, what's going on? Do we see any current opportunities? How are those recent federal actions impacting our plans? I'm going to talk to us about the Big Red Utilities Reliability and Energy Transition Master Planning Process. Hi, I'm Stacy Edwards. I'm the Program Manager for Big Red. You're it. Utilities Reliability and Energy Transition. Hope that you guys get the acronym. Come and talk to me. it turns out energy, master planning, it's super fun, super exciting. It is. Okay, full disclosure, I'm an engineer. But the master planning effort, it's considering all the commercially available technologies to decarbonize campus. It's also laying in the financial implications. So the capital costs, the operating costs, it's considering the emission reduction in CO2 from different actions. It's overseen by faculty, community, staff. We're reporting up to the trustees in 2026. So a program of this magnitude, particularly in light of Cornell's current financial constraints, requires buying at the highest level. I also had said we're looking at the commercially available technologies. What about the exciting new things coming on? And that's why the plan is going to be dynamic. So as grid emissions change, as finances change, as available technology change, we want to be able to update that plan and continue to have a current road map to decarbonize campus. So I think there's something for everyone here. If you're not an engineer, don't be afraid. Still come and talk to me. Talk to us about our source heat. Hi, my name is Brock Ehrlich. I'm the geothermal engineer with Cornell Fistler Peace. And Wayne Vaznikeri, he's somewhere in the back, he and I were working on this project, as well as many campuses partners what EarthSource Heat is actually EarthSource Heats explores the use of deep geothermal to heat Cornell's the thicket campus without use of fossil fuels but you know this is a very interdisciplinary involves a lot of interdisciplinary research plus transparent risk assessment and more importantly data the data is coming up from Bohol Observatory, which is two-mile deep, and which is funded with $7.2 million DOE grant, and which we plan to deepen to get more data, more critical engineering data, as well as samples. Now, the ultimate goal what sets the part is that is, in here, the Cornell wants to determine whether the deep geothermal energy can be a safe and scalable solution for not just here but cold climates worldwide and this is where it actually overlaps with what Rayna presented and this is one of the main questions that Cornell is after to pursue in a living lab where Sean will be actually talking about. Hello everybody my name is Sean Dougherty I'm with Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the energy and transitions partnership lead and I've been here asked to talk a little bit about living labs of course there's many living labs experiments on campus like we just heard about go to the website for campus sustainability to see a longer list I've been asked to present on several Atkinson sponsor or facilitated ones you might have read about the mobile battery energy storage system which was recently brought on campus to replace diesel generators at at events, shout out to Julie Parsons and the events team and facilities for that. Additionally, Tobias will talk a little bit later about an Atkinson-funded carbon capture lab. And we're really excited to have one of the smart people Rick talked about here with us, Lauren Ray, with CALS Pro Dairy and an Atkinson Fellow, to talk about a third one, an experimental anaerobic digester at the teaching dairy. Hi, everyone. I'm Lauren Ray. So, yes, I work primarily with dairy farms as a senior extension associate. I'm also an engineer, though, so I'm good company here, and a focus on energy and sustainability in agriculture. So the small-scale biodigester that Sean mentioned, we're planning for construction next year, and this is really exciting because what it will showcase is really small -scale technology around anaerobic digesters that process organic waste, such as livestock manure and food waste including things like acid whey from dairy processing or oils from cooking and what this allows is for energy generation as well as for nutrient recovery. So I think you know what I want to have you take away is that biodigesters are an opportunity for a really high capacity factor flexible energy source and in New York State right now we have about 30 megawatts equivalent of digesters processing dairy manure some with food waste some without we have opportunity for really 10 to 20 times that and most of those are generating it as a renewable gas which could be stored and transported to other locations for providing heat and electricity so i think it's that there's a lot of opportunities we're excited to have this on cornell's campus as really a stepping stone toward what could be done in the state as well as at Cornell for peak heating needs. Come and talk to us after. My name is Todd Cowan. I'm a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of the DeFreeze hydraulics lab. I'm here today to talk a bit about tidal energy and Rana has set me up perfectly because as he pointed out to all of us one of the great challenges of renewable energy is that the vast majority of the low-cost versions solar and wind are known as in the industry as non dispatchable we can't tell the wind when to blow we can't tell the Sun when to shine wish we could but we can predict when tides occur essentially forever we've been doing it for hundreds of years actually so the reality is we know exactly when tidal currents will occur a current is a flow that means it has velocity and as As many of you remember from your physics class in high school, energy is related to velocity square. So we have higher speed flows, we have much more energy. Imagine if we could convert 50% or more of that kinetic energy in the water flow to electricity in the grid. Well, the reality is we can. We partnered with At Sea Development, who are, it was founded by original co -founders of Verdon Power. Some of you may be aware, Burden Power had the first Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license to demonstrate a tidal energy project in the state of New York, in fact, in Roosevelt Island, right next to our New York City campus. And they had several months of 99.9% uptime tidal energy with a capacity factor of over 50 % and a water-to-water efficiency of over 50%. So now I ask you to imagine you're standing at a beach on the north fork of Long Island, looking out over Long Island Sound, islands of New York, Connecticut, the distant shores. I'm leading a team of Cornell multidisciplinary researchers partnered with AtSea to envision 100 megawatts of tidal energy underneath. So when you first get there, you don't see anything. And we've been successful, and we have convinced investors to build this system out. And you come back three or four years later, you plug in your electric vehicle in the parking lot and stare out at that water, and what do you see? You see exactly the same view. The other beauty of tidal energy is it has no surface signature. It requires essentially no onshore land in the downstate environment where land is so valuable, and in the Federal Regulatory Commission where there seems to be a see-no-renewables emphasis. So if you want to talk more about tidal energy, come stop by my poster. All right and I'm Meredith Rutherford. I'm with the campus sustainability office and I've had the pleasure of working with a working group, a cross-campus working group, to address carbon sinks and sequestration. So how does this fit in with everyone else? You know we have this amazing innovation ingenuity on how to reduce carbon emissions but we also know that there are certain emissions that we just won't likely be able to avoid with our academic mission for us to completely avoid air travel is probably not likely commuting these types of emissions we have to figure out how to create a counterbalance or some type of offset so the university gave us charge to the workgroup to look and use its resources as expertise and we turn to the land and in the 23 ,000 acres of Cornell Lands, we identified 16 different land management processes that could increase carbon sinks and sequestration. We were charged to try and find 30,000 metric tons. You'll have to come and see me to know how many we found in the end and which practices are the most promising. But we had the pleasure of interviewing all the land managers to understand how they're currently managing their lands and what would be feasible in a perfect world with all the resources available, but what can we do differently? And that was a really exciting process that we quantified and then we mapped, GIS mapped, and we recently summarized in a feasibility report. So we're looking forward to turning this into implementation and if you want to know more, please come see me. All right, I think we're concluding the lightning rounds, and we're going to open up for the next 20 to 30 minutes for questions, so feel free to bounce around and ask us questions. All right, everyone, sit down. Eat cookies. I'm instructed to tell you that the cookies are not decorations. Please eat them. Yep, you're going to need your strength. your brain needs to be on for these next couple of topics which are more detail on some amazing living lab projects right thank you thank you thank you okay first up I am so happy to introduce not saying he's been a longtime wonderful collaborator on living lab projects and as you can see he is the Irving Porter Church professor of engineering as well as a provost fellow for public engagement in the Sibley School. So Max and I are going to talk to you about agrivoltaics. So hopefully, so this is not just me, also Sarah, Carrie, and Gerald who couldn't be here. So hopefully in 15 minutes we'll share our stories. It's interesting stories and how, you know, starting with some concept and vision to the actual living lab project right I think just quickly probably run already covered it but the this is from the CL CPA scoping plan of course this is in late 2022 but the idea here is in order to decarbonize the economy essentially for in New York states where the source of energy right so I think of course it's a basic graph but unmistakably the solar right part of it is a very prominent so the idea here is regardless whatever you do solar gonna play a critical role right so you may argue nuclear energy gonna have a share here yes right so nuclear it's going to about considering how long it's kind of built or and we are only playing probably one or two it's you know the renewable energy is still going to play it quickly all right so you know this just the right figure just showing relatively how the renewable compared to other sources so why not take home message here is that according to this plan, right? So in order to determine the economy in your state alone, we need about 60 gigawatts of solar in the state. So how much do we have, which is a good question. So I think we are somewhere between six and 10. We're probably, we all achieved the goal of six gigawatts about a year ago, and the new goal is 10, but I was saying, well, to be there, right? So it's still a large gap. I need another 50 gigawatt of solar. Need to be built in order to go. So, but at the same time, renewable energy tend to be energy land intensive, right? So, because renewables tend to be diffuse energy, not have very high energy density, right? So, in order to provide same amount of power, right? you tend to need a more area of land right so you know once again this interesting number so as right now if you're the one megawatt solar right you per need a five to seven acre of land right what does it mean Cornell main campus Cornell main can we're not talking about all the agricultural and surrounding right Cornell main campus about 750 acres right so if you we do the south environment I'm not saying we're gonna do that in reality if you turn out our building turn Cornell main campus into a big solar power plant with just a little bit over a hundred mega hundred megawatt right only a small share of the city gigawatt we need to to achieve so and you know if you do this calculation you saw well compared to all line we have is still a small fraction right so but so this is from a paper we published in 2021 but I worked on 2020 so maybe so we did a two part of the analysis this language analysis for the states when the first part is we look at how many solar sites at the time right already on the agricultural lands by about 40% right so this is what again this is 2020 so by now I think the number is larger right and but another part analysis is to look at based on the criteria you know solar developer are looking for how much of the land in the future going to be on the aircraft you solar can be a cultural land we found going to be more than 80% right so why it because sort of Romans are looking forward for a very similar land as very similar criteria that fits the agricultural career for example you do want the land that's flat right clear of vegetation close to road and ideally close to the transmission right so if you add it all together right so what solar they were looking for is well matched with the agriculture land so and which is you know humans all once again is only a small fraction of the land if you just look to a number but it does have the impact on the on the agriculture I would say did you know the impact of this paper is more on the agricultural community right and you know because in you know engineers think that's of course a small percentage but for agriculture is pretty vital so I think this is this paper like I said in 2020 I think started a few things one is really make me think about different way of building so all right so that's bring a topic of I grow a global take Sarah making this beautiful slide with a color with well matched with a gray with our culture and a photo tape right so this is the definition based on the New York State ag market so what does actually look like so but again thanks our for collecting those images you know typically there two type of activity essentially solar plus something right so one is is grazing right you can grazing animals the animal including sheep there's another long story we can go back how to start it in in Ithaca new chicken it's rabbit and actually one of the you know emerging areas the cattle right so how you can great cattle at the solar farm a lot of tenor challenges but a very promising but there are another type is crops right can you co-locating crop productions with a way the solar production right so that's essentially you know on the grazing side especially for sheep grazing it's almost economically viable right because you promote the benefits you know you essentially sheep take care of the validation management which sold it well how to pay anyway but on the core side because we have inherent challenges here you know Northeast because a panel and crops are competing for the same resources right they want to all want so you know solar really to to to thrive so there's inherent channel how you do the design right so apparently Sarah has done some experiment herself you want to tell a little bit about your strawberry stories yeah so I have some ground mount solar panels at home and a friend gave me some some strawberry plants which are a little bit hard to make out here looking a little sad when we first put them in but I dropped them in there and then there was a very late frost that year and I don't know if you can see from where you're sitting but there's a 18 yeah May 18th there's a very clear line everything under the solar panels was not frosted everything outside was heavily frosted so I sent this to Max who sent me back a very appropriate empirical evidence reply and so I've been having a great time and you know just a month later I had these beautiful berries from my unfrozen plants I was picking strawberries in November you believe that I've expanded my operation now I have they've grown as you can see they've really flourished I don't do anything to them they just grow and I've planted some everbearing varieties in So I have more strawberries than I know what to do with and I'm still picking strawberries like on their shoulder season So it works. That was one aha moment Okay Well, you incurred by several of the empirical evidence, right? The question is for researcher, you know, what where are you gonna do this kind of research, right? So There's a long line of tax here, but it's hard, right? Working with operating solar farm is hard, right? So you basically had to work with a perfect seeking entity, which is for a good reason, right? I'm not saying, you know, they shouldn't, right? So, and you had to work around set access and others. I'm gonna share a little story later. It's hard, right? So, but also, you know, for research, you wanna do something that's not exist, right? You wanna create something that has not exist yet, right? So that's the innovation, you know, working with existing solar farm preventing you from doing that. So So that's the sort of research the idea of the research solar farm came up. So, you know, this those type of solar farm prioritize research over perfect making, right? We're not seeing in the long run, right? There's research results will guide the future perfect making, but not at a research stage, right? But we also emphasize on on Unimation, create something that has not existed. So that's the idea. You know, there's a debate, actually, you know, this is the story part. I remember when we were doing that, there's a debate whether which one is a better approach. So of course the second one is ideal, but it's who gonna pay for it, it's gonna be costly, right? So if you remember the paper I just listed, actually have another sort of interesting impact is being quoted in a New York State law basis support cows for their equity research because this particular program does not give funding for building actually new solar farm so our colleague in Cal had to seek new collaboration from existing solar farms to work on their research and the interesting story is I think Sarah can share more is that it has been three years that's our colleague had been trying to work with the developer on the musgrave solar farm to allow them to conduct agriculture research right remember this solar farm is on Cornell land for now it doesn't own the sort of facility but on Cornell land right when we build the solar farm the agreement is they will whatever they do gonna allow research right so I know Sarah had a long story to show to share you know you want to share a little bit yeah we don't think we have that much time a bottom line is we're still not in there it's not dead yet that's that's that's the phrase but we're close we have yeah we're so close our friends in environmental health and safety have been wonderful and Carrie Marshner has been very patient and we hope next growing season that we will we will be in there I've been three years right so we talked to CEO you know multiple CEOs Still not happening yet. So, okay, just so how hard it is, right? So now, so now I've got to plan it. So we, with NYSERDA funding, right? So to the agricultural experimental stations at cows, we're going to build the three solar farms. One in Ithaca, about seven acres, right? So I'm going to tell each one of those, you know, based on that mass about a one megawatt-ish, right? So kind of a mix of a panel with different height, different row spacing kind of target to post a few crops like a haze and soybean or others and also special about some vegetables in Hudson Valley research lab so they can a very targeted at this overhead system gonna show some cartoon later and targeting at Apple agri-tech look at a vertical panels targeting at Concord groups quickly so this discussion I saw Sarah I had a discussion so I would say I still remember then June 2022 we start brainstorming this idea I think at that time Sarah is trying to build a some kind of rooftop solar at the teaching there so I was thinking is there's we can build a bigger one because it's not gonna help anything so and then we look at land in front we find there's a piece land a circle there a white circle natural teaching dairy farm something nobody's using it so can we build a soil farm there so we and then we had to follow the rules here at Cornell so we talked to Leslie they said you know so Leslie can you find out sites that's we can potentially build a soil all right so lastly go screen the entire Cornell properties and that's the only site has no long-term planning purposes which is accidentally found that site by the time right so and we started just broader campus engagement try to see is it possible right so it's not easy and then we realized we are doing exactly what solar developer is doing we are turning agriculture line into solar farm right so it is hard right so especially in some of the land stewardship but I think really thanks to Ben finance and a 2030 project right so and through that support that we are get us a group together right so really bring different colleges, different part of campus, to really start designing the Anchor Solar Department. This is for Ithaca. So in that campus engagement, I think one of the important piece is there are some multiple benefits coming out, not just for research itself, right, but apparently has other critical, maybe you can... Yeah, we're short on time, so I'll just suffice to say, the information on this slide is we need what's known as renewable energy credits for not only to support our climate action plan, but to comply with codes and regulations to build new buildings. You know, Matt was talking about our design and construction standards and, you know, our desire to make net-zero buildings. So, recs, there's different kinds of recs, right, from different projects, different vintages, you know, they don't all count. So, it's important to have, you know, credits from projects that we have been part of bring to fruition. So, the site on our campus is not only special because it's right here on campus, convenient for research, connects to our grid, which gives us more flexibility, but it produces is the kind of recs that we need to comply with code. So I can say, or I can allow to say, if you go to the, in the next year, when the Manning Recreation Center is ready, when you go to gym, relax or exercise, this solar farm, the Chem-Onk Solar, actually provide a renewable energy credit to make that happen, right? So, all right, so there's another, gonna be a little bit quick here, not an unbeatable advantage so I stole the slide from Tobias so and the solar farm you can see here right that's a NYSERDA logo right if the solar farm side is a NYSERDA logo and Kubo sites and the capture side as a Tobiah going to talk about also the anaerobic digester they're all within walking distance they are like within 10 minutes or five minutes walking distance they are just next to each other right so I think that's bad to what Tobiah had been working on this energy nexus vision right okay so quickly um so for the Hudson Valley so almost in parallel uh so Hudson uh you know Hudson Valley research I had been think about this old head system for for the Apple altered right so I mentioned the May 18 2023 events right so I remember very clearly because I read the news that 80% of the apple crops in the state was what decimated right so and this can potentially provide you know this early or late frost protection and others right so and uh so um the last one is in our the ag attacks in geneva right so um this is also in 2023 a lot of things happened in 2023 so after the ithaca parade um so i saw justin vendor uh and she said we need to talk she said i have an idea but we need to talk she said you know so justin working on on grapes right so she said there's 3,000 30 ,000 acres of Concord grapes vineyard in this you know new york and pitch vineyard region they tend to be they tend to be flat right as compared to the wine grapes right one great change one a hill right so but also farmer are struggling right because you know depend on the crop different the price of the the concrete grip crop so they hard to make enemies right they oftentimes had to make a second job in order to make it work so it's a way we can build a solar to it so and then sort of we came up with the idea of vertical you know how the idea how we can preserve the agriculture right and still have a renewable energy generation all right so the and you know we come with this worker panel we compare the different options right so tracking overhead and vertical we think vertical perfect the most appropriate in term of achieve with the co -benefits and and so that's that design hopefully will be tested at a Geneva site. Lastly, this is a big team effort, so a lot of people, a lot of institutions has contributed in various ways, so when I always, I feel very nervous to make a list because I always miss some people, right? apologize I miss your name but it's really a broad collaboration and and and I would say personally if in the future people ask me Max have you ever devolved a solar farms probably yes probably at least two of them I think Thanks, Max. All right, let me do a quick swap here, two slides for our next speaker, who is Tobias. I'm going to hand it right to Tobias. Take it away. Thank you. So it's exciting to be part of this summit, especially, so first of all, thanks for setting up the lightning talks. I think that was really interesting, really well done. So I'm going to give you a quick sort of vignette on another element within the Living Lab, and the main protagonist of my story is this trailer here, so that's the Capture Lab. This is part of the Living Lab ecosystem, and it's something, in my mind, not just a good slogan in terms of figuring out what we can do as a community, collaborations between students, faculty, staff, on the sustainability challenge. I think Cornell is uniquely positioned to advance in this space and this idea of looking at everything that we have on campus as sort of a living lab where we can test some of these ideas, where we can have conversations between different technologies that are emerging and then actually testing them, I think is is a super exciting distinction for how Cornell approaches that compared to other institutions. If you're interested in it, the QR code in the top right takes you to a video that I've put together to try to capture some of this. So it has lake source cooling, it has the power plant and a lot of the other emerging concepts that Max also spoke about on the energy nexus on the far side of this rendering here. So that's as a video aside. So the genesis of the Capture Lab starts here. And Rick mentioned earlier, there's no secret ingredient. I would agree with that. But I think there's a key ingredient to any of these initiatives. And for this particular project, it's the students that are in the center that have worked on catalyst development in my lab in a basement of Olin Hall, so it's interesting to see that this is now almost a decade ago, but I remember distinctly the sorts of things that they were interested in in terms of developing the catalyst. It's one thing to write a paper on this, and in the introductory paragraphs of the paper, you can make claims about this technology could be very impactful in terms of valorizing CO2 emissions, but what's interesting is that within within the scientific community there's not really that much validation on it right you make a claim in the intro and then you prove the science and then you can show okay it works in the lab but there's a critical gap to showing it works in the lab to is it truly really impactful is it really translatable right and it's that's one of the things that I think this project nicely illustrated and going from just prototypes in the basement to now the startup Dimensional Energy making sustainable aviation fuels from the materials that were developed there. So in many ways inspiring and interesting to look at. The fact that it's a 10-year timeline I think is something important to look at because there's a critical need to accelerate that and that's where the CAPTCHA lab actually comes in. So when we, sorry about the misalignment on the title there, but when we had to validate this as part of the Carbon X Prize close to 10 years ago, one of the first things that comes up is, okay, this is good, but does it, A, does it work with real flue gas, not high purity CO2 in a lab environment without any impurities and everything that's carefully controlled, as you would do in a scientific setting but to translate it the first question that comes up is does it work how long does it work and is it translatable so beyond the initial validations that we did in in Olin Hall the way Carbon XPRIZE was set up is that you go to Gillette Wyoming to coal -fired power plant so in the picture there that's Jason Selfie the CEO of Dimensional driving our scale up pilot system to Gillette, where they then set up a station to test that and to validate that. So that's the sort of thing that's necessary, and I think that's the critical gap that the Capture Lab aims to address. There are a lot of technologies that would benefit from validating the performance in a real-world setting, even if it's not yet at the scale of building a pilot-scale facility similar to what what Jason's pulling there in the trailer so that's the idea behind the the capture lab the idea is basically we have a co2 source right on campus right there's a there's a combined cycle power plant just a 10 minute walk from here you don't have to drive all the way to Wyoming to do that so that was the idea is that we basically wanted to validate other technologies similar to what's shown in the in the top here so this is not photochemical, but this is electrochemical conversion, again, from either CO2 or CO2 and methane, say, biogas. And then to translate that from discovery in the lab to impact, what we initially did is, so the bottom left is a picture of Alex Gonzalez, we're now Dr. Alex Gonzalez and myself, walked over to the power plant, and we met up with Josh, yeah, basically asked, can we get some flue gas? And we got those five -gallon bags that we then carried back to the lab and tested with it. So that's one way to do it. But I think there's a lot more benefit to making that a bit more accessible and scalable. So that's the idea with the CAPTURE lab. So it's actually an acronym for Cornell Advanced Platform for Testing, Utilization, and Research. It's a little bit offset. that the E is somewhat silent, except for the third bullet point there. So the idea is that you have that facility accessible to researchers working on either CO2 capture and conversion technologies. If you want to go to a funding agency or an investor, and if they want to know, OK, this is cool, cool science, cool paper, the figures look great, but does it actually work? You can use this facility to actually demonstrate that. or to identify the conditions under which it is actually viable. And I think it's also an interesting way, for the third bullet point on the objectives there, it's a new way to set up collaborations between what we do here and also external institutions and other entrepreneurial partners. So it's not just an academic facility, but for companies that are interested in this space, and they're not yet at the scale of going to the National Carbon Capture Facility in Alabama, this is a critical sort of intermediate step to get there. So now you know what the Capture Lab is. I should also clarify what the Capture Lab is not, and I apologize if this is one of those plastic bag uses of AI. I basically took that picture and I said, add a carbon capture and conversion system there. So that is not what we're doing. The idea is not to capture the CO2 emissions from the power plant, but rather to set up a trailer similar to what's shown here, and then use that to accelerate the lab-to-market translations, that it doesn't have to take 10 years to validate that. The fact that it's in a trailer is an important part of it because it gives us mobility and versatility to different sort of feedstocks. So flue gas is one, and this is relatively low in terms of CO2 concentration, on the order of 8% or so. But given that it's mobile and what Max mentioned earlier for other sort of sources, so the anaerobic digester that Lauren and Sean also mentioned earlier, that's another source where you can say, okay, this technology allows you to convert biogas to something valuable, but you want to test under which conditions it works. and then you basically just drive the trailer over there and see if it works. So beyond that, I'm a chemical engineer, so I do process flow diagrams, but this is basically the less fancy version of what Max showed earlier. It's a perspective on what we can do with the anaerobic digester and the capture lab being essentially an enabling component towards partnerships with the startups that are listed in the diagram here. So to illustrate ways to valorize biogas emissions or flue gas emissions to value -added products. Because in my mind, I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that in order for any of this technology, however enthusiastic you might be about it, if it doesn't generate value, it's not going to scale. right and you might look at it as a bad capitalistic thing but I think that's just fundamentally how we have to have to look at it in terms of actually generating value out of these submissions so with with that I have the same problem that that Max mentioned a lot of people to thank for in moving this forward in particular Sean and the Atkinson Center for for for guiding us through this there's been lots of interesting learning experiences like do have a building permit to set up the trailer do you have registration because it has wheels those sorts of things so that's in progress and we're hoping to have this set up q1 or q2 of next year and I think it'll be a really interesting sort of enabling component for these types of technologies and their translation here so with that thank you and happy to address any questions our time together so I'm super happy to introduce our closing speaker but I'll just say in case you need to scoot right away please please please return these Meredith made them for us and we're very attached to them so please drop them off when you wait back all right so to close this out today we have David Lodge I probably don't even need to introduce him but I will he is the Francis J de Salvo director of the Cornell Atkins Center for sustainability he is an internationally recognized environmental scientist with expertise and environmental risk assessment, freshwater and marine coastal ecology, ecosystem services, bioeconomics and invasive species and a leader in development and application of environmental DNA or eDNA. So during his 40-year career his research has improved ecological forecasting to better inform environmental risk assessment, natural resource management, and policy development. Throughout it all David has collaborated with engineers, economists, historians, theologians, and philosophers and has partnered with nonprofit organizations and corporations to bring his scientific work to the public policy arena. This broad experience has shaped his leadership at Cornell from which we have greatly benefited at the Sustainable Cornell Campus group in our own campus sustainability office and also over nearly a decade directing Cornell Atkinson. He strengthened the university's sustainability research enterprise supporting a network of more than 700 faculty fellows five and a half million annually in research awards and expanding a vibrant community of students and postdoc scholars and in the spring David will retire after ten years of dedicated service leaving a lasting legacy of connecting Cornell sustainability research with real-world impact through collaborations with industry government and decision makers and your buddies here in facilities so I think it's very appropriate for David to close us out today thank you thank you Thank you, Sarah, for that gracious introduction and mentioning the end of my tenure coming up. I won't break into tears, I promise, not today, anyway. Okay, oh, sure. So it is my privilege to sort of close out today's excellent meeting. I wanna say a couple of words about Cornell Atkinson and then reflect a little bit on what we've all heard and participated in today so Cornell Atkinson is mission driven and problem focused and our priorities include reducing climate risks and accelerating the energy transition the two themes that bring us all into this room today so working with partners across campus faculty and staff experts from whatever corner of the university that's relevant we strive to bring help bring change within Cornell and working with partners outside of campus, non-profits, for-profits, corporations, civil society organizations, we bring Cornell experts together with those experts in arenas outside the academy to help drive change, positive change outside the academy. So we fund co-created and co-executed projects, and I see people looking at the screen, that That has nothing to do with what I'm saying, but it's a pretty picture, so you can keep looking at that while you listen to me. So it's our mission to help drive change, and we do it with the expertise that many people have referred to that is present so strongly, so deeply, and so broadly at Cornell. So for the rest of my comments, I just want to reflect on some things that we've heard today and the challenges ahead. Cornell's carbon commitment was first made in in 2007. The goal of carbon neutrality later, seven years later in 2014, the state established those ambitious goals that we've heard speakers talk about in the CLCPA in 2019. Lots of ongoing discussions about how that's going to be implemented in the state. At the same time local energy codes have changed in Ithaca, most recently in 2021 so that's a moving landscape of both cornell's policy aspirations and the policy aspirations that Cornell operates in that are imposed from outside. So our goals are essential, our ambitious goals are essential. Our leadership is essential, as our keynote speaker emphasized first thing this morning. But it is also important to recognize that we, Cornell University, as big and powerful and influential in an organization as we are, we operate in a bunch of different systems to which we are accountable. and, in some cases, on which we can have some influence, and we strive to exercise that influence. So there's lots of challenges ahead against the backdrop of lots of progress, and certainly in my decade here. So setting goals is in some ways easy. The reality of accomplishing those goals is messy. It's messy because Cornell, as I said, and all of us, if you've looked on all of our individual decisions every day are affected by the systems in which we live and operate. So Cornell University can't operate independently. None of us can operate independently. We are compelled to consider the policies that surround us, sometimes give us opportunities and sometimes constrain us. And we must always consider what is financially prudent. So those larger systems have sometimes been helpful. I think Sarah would say that the federal landscape of policies over the last few years was extremely helpful, made it possible to drive the dramatic increase in solar power that we have. But those policies are not there anymore. And so the policy and the financial incentives that are set up by policy change, and we've got to change and adapt our strategies along with it. Let me just give you one example, sort of a small specific example, which makes it easy to talk about, but I invite you to think about it in the context of all the bigger progress and challenges that we've had as well. So one of the living laboratory projects that Sean Daugherty from Cornell-Ankinson mentioned earlier is this mobile battery system that was recently unveiled on the AgQuad just a couple of weeks ago. That involved many partners on campus, involved the manufacturer, Viridi, NYSERDA, NYPA, and many other external partners, tremendous collaboration with facilities and campus services, and others on campus. That battery, now we have one, it can replace a diesel generator at big events, as it was demonstrated on the Ag Quad. But it incorporates some technological innovations, particularly one of them that's relevant to this is fire suppression. It's not going to explode like some lithium -ion batteries have done in well-publicized events in other settings. However, that safety technology that Verity has built into the battery is not recognized. That technological innovation is not recognized in local and some state codes. So that became an impediment to our adopting this and being able to demonstrate it in the way that we had hoped to demonstrate on campus. I don't say that to criticize those codes. It is just an example that I want you to take away and think about of how fast technological innovation can occur and how it often leads before the policy can adapt and make it possible for that technology to scale in the marketplace in the way that Tobias emphasized at the end of his comments. so appropriately if something doesn't scale in the marketplace it is not going to be a solution for Cornell or anyone else so we have that new battery technology it will help us at Cornell University but we and others may want to have lots more of those in the future and to take full advantage of them we need local and larger scale policies to change and so this illustrates also this This process of bringing all those parties together to get that battery to Cornell is now leading to coordinated efforts to educate policymakers and to get the relevant policies changed so that we can take fuller advantage of the technological innovation that is now available to us. To me, that's just a microcosm of the bigger efforts, the goal setting, and the implementation and action plans that we've been seeing and helping with at Cornell for the last decade and much before that. So let me conclude by saying that implementation is the hard part, and I want to conclude with a declaration of sort of respect for not only the leadership and commitments that Cornell has made through multiple generations of university leaders and through multiple generations of leaders of the campus facilities and campus services, which Rick Burgess represents now. I want to end with a declaration of support and admiration and respect for those people in campus and facilities and the sustainability office that Sarah so often represents in doing the hard work often under duress from many different directions inside and outside for doing the hard work of plotting the way for Cornell to achieve its goals of carbon neutrality and in doing so to lead the way for others to do the same. So please join me in thanking them for organizing this meeting and for the work they do every day.