This article does not intend to single out the University of California at San Diego (UC at San Diego). It is just one example of many like it across the country. What follows is my attempt to draw out weaknesses while demonstrating potentials.

UC San Diego is an example of good intentions with much greater potential than what has been set up so far.

The UC San Diego campus is powered by an on site natural gas-fired combined heat, cooling and power plant (CCHP). While this plant is able to produce 82% of the electricity the campus needs it also supplies 95% of the heating and cooling. An on site photovoltaic installation is able to produce a megawatt of electricity. That is not very much. The system is also equipped with a 3.8 million gallon water tank to hold chilled water until it is needed so the plant can continue operating at full efficiency at all times.

Overall the system is rated at 66% which is about double what most coal-fired power plants are able to achieve. Impressive but it does leave room for improvement. The campus through its localized smart grid is able to control demand as well as supply which helps cut costs while improving system efficiency. The question is how much human interaction is there with this smart grid? Even here there is room for improvement.

What I was not able to establish was if the campus had made other improvements such as super insulating buildings and the pipes that carry the heating or cooling so the overall size if the system could be cut down while raising efficiency. A smaller system would be more efficient.

Another suggestion would be to add more solar installations. First, adding efficient solar heating system would help reduce the size of a Combined Cooling and Heating Power Plant. Adding several concentrated solar stirling systems could further produce renewable electricity. Such a system is around 35% efficient which is more than double the output of current photovoltaic panels at a better price. For people who haven’t heard of a stirling engine it a heat engine but unlike an internal combustion engine heat is supplied from the outside and the entire engine is sealed which makes it more efficient prone to less failure. Such an engine could also contribute heat. Electric energy can be stored on site in a warehouse filled with storage tanks for the compressed air. By having several tanks of varying sizes the system again gains resiliency over one large tank or even a handful of large tanks. Compressed air is also an efficient way to store electricity over batteries that lose capacity and finally fail. The only way compressed air tanks fail is if they are punctured or other parts fail outright.

Natural gas is running out at a similar rate to petroleum (which reached peak oil in 2006) despite the fracking to keep up natural gas supplies. One problem with that idea is that much of the energy is wasted looking for and then fracking a site with super heated water and chemicals. If it were such a good idea it would have already brought down the price of natural gas, but it hasn’t done so in the decades it has been used. To hinge a system like UC San Diego on natural gas is not wise as first thought. Over time it would only raise the cost of energy not keep it stable like renewables could.

A suggestion I have is to install at least two, possibly more, biogas systems that convert sewage and campus food waste into methane (natural gas) and fertilizer that can be returned to farmers in exchange for a better price on food. Such a system if built correctly could produce most of the gas the campus needs. And with other improvements such as super insulation the biogas would be more than sufficient I believe.

I would hope that UC San Diego students and staff would see this as an opportunity to do better making the campus more sustainable and a true example that renewable energy sources can do to power the future. But then again I can hope, can’t I.