Develop Your Decarbonization Plan

Building an effective Decarbonization Plan requires thorough preparation and analysis to meet targets while maintaining resilience and addressing cost-effectiveness. Through the planning process, campus stakeholders can celebrate progress made to date, use data to understand the current state, and develop strategies to align decarbonization plans with existing campus goals and strategies.

The Six Step Decarbonization Planning Process

A well-crafted decarbonization planning process includes input and participation from a range of stakeholders. The planning process should result in a robust, instructional, and action-oriented plan with a clear strategy informing key milestones, interim and final goals, and well-defined roles and responsibilities.

The general strategy in decarbonizing buildings and campuses will include defining existing conditions, finding opportunities for energy reduction, and moving away from primary fossil fuel use through electrification of heating and cooling systems.

Step One: Assemble Your Team

Key individuals to involve in the planning process include personnel from various departments such as facilities, sustainability, capital planning and real estate, and finance. Gaining support from senior leaders early on and throughout the planning process is key to getting the final plan approved. In addition, communicating and collaborating with other campus stakeholders will offer input, build momentum, and secure additional buy-in to implementing the plan.

Step Two: Define Your Scope

A scope of work for decarbonization planning provides the ingredients for a productive and comprehensive planning process. Key components include:

Baseline energy usage & GHG emissions. Defining baseline energy usage and Scope 1 & 2 GHG emissions is a foundational step in campus decarbonization planning. This involves a thorough assessment of the current energy use by major end use and fuel type, including natural gas, purchased electricity, and renewable energy. Understanding energy consumption patterns across different times of the year and identifying peak usage periods provides critical insights into the campus's energy demand. This helps set realistic energy reduction targets and provide the basis for measuring progress throughout the decarbonization timeline.

Deliverable clarification. The general strategy in decarbonizing buildings and campuses will include defining existing conditions, finding opportunities for energy reduction, and moving away from primary fossil fuel use through electrification of heating and cooling systems.

Communications plan development. In some campus environments, it may help to socialize the plan and ultimately gather support for it by baking in a communications strategy to share your findings, potential solutions, and decision-making criteria throughout the planning process.

Step Three: Lay the Groundwork

Again, understanding your current state will give you a sense of where there are areas of opportunity to decarbonize. A greenhouse gas emissions inventory should be coupled with details from a campus master plan to see how campus infrastructure might change over time, as well as a deferred maintenance schedule to assess when equipment is at the end of its life.

The decarbonization plan should align with other related plans and consider relevant drivers to accomplish shared goals, avoid conflicts and truly integrate for an efficient and effective approach.

Step Four: Identify and Prioritize Near Term Energy Efficiency Opportunities

Energy benchmarking. Energy benchmarking provides insight to understanding and improving campus energy performance. This process compares the campus's energy usage against similar facilities or industry standards, which can highlight areas for improvement and set performance targets. The metric typically used is energy use intensity (EUI), which represents annual energy use per unit of building area (kilo British thermal unit per square foot (kBtu/SF).

Suggested tools for energy benchmarking include:

EPA’s ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager® : This tool allows institutions to track and measure energy and water consumption across buildings, enabling comparison with similar facilities nationwide, as well as tracking trends for a given building over time.

Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) : Building owners can use the data to compare building energy performance against similar buildings. Conducted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), CBECS provides a representative dataset by building type, size, age, and region.

Assessing and prioritizing your building portfolio. Assess your building portfolio by creating a comprehensive spreadsheet of each building’s greenhouse gas emissions, energy sources and distribution methods, and HVAC systems and deferred maintenance schedules.

Then identify an approach to performing building-level assessments or audits based on one of the following:

• “Representative buildings” approach. This approach involves grouping buildings by key factors such as emissions intensity, building type, and system characteristics. This method allows the planning team to focus on representative buildings for audits, enabling high-impact and scalable solutions. By targeting buildings that best represent the larger portfolio, this approach enables an efficient road-mapping process by avoiding audits of every building within the portfolio. Once strategies are evaluated for representative buildings, scale the results across the entire portfolio.
• “Priority buildings” approach. This approach prioritizes buildings based on criteria such as top energy users, highest emitters, or emission intensity. This approach targets the buildings responsible for the majority of energy consumption and emissions. Performing emissions-reduction audits at these priority buildings will help identify building-specific strategies to maximize decarbonization impact.
• “Peak energy and systems” approach. This approach involves a review of the peak energy usage of all campus systems and identification of those which most impact peak fuel for both electricity and fossil fuels. Load reduction measures such as improved building envelope, lighting and plug load strategies, and installing other energy-efficient equipment will help reduce overall peak demand of these systems and keep new equipment sizes smaller and more cost effective.

Step Five: Conduct Energy Audits & Look for No-Regret Actions

Perform energy audits of campus buildings and systems with enough detail to recommend specific improvements and quantify the costs and impacts. These audits provide actionable insights for targeted energy efficiency measures (EEM’s). The on-site investigation and evaluation of energy systems will involve interviews with appropriate campus staff and data collection in each building to gain an understanding of building and process energy system characteristics and operations & maintenance (O&M) practices, known problems and concerns, and staff ideas for energy conservation and infrastructure renewal.

An institution can implement no-regret actions during the planning phase, rather than waiting for plan completion. These actions are “quick wins” that offer immediate benefits, offsetting their implementation costs through direct or indirect gains. These actions, illustrated in the table below, can reduce energy use and costs and help minimize the size of future systems, ultimately reducing overall capital expenses for the larger decarbonization strategy.

Step Six: Finalize Your Plan

By focusing on high-impact opportunities and aligning with long-term sustainability targets, campuses can create a phased, actionable plan that enables progress aligned with operational and financial efficiency.

1. (Re)evaluate goals and targets. Your institution may have established emissions reduction goals, or it may be relying on a decarbonization planning process to formulate these goals based on an iterative discovery process. Before finalizing your plan, evaluate your goals and interim targets to determine whether the pathways you’ve identified can align with institutional commitments, finances, technological feasibility, and other influencing criteria.
2. Develop decarbonization pathways. Create multiple pathways (scenarios) that combine energy efficiency, electrification, and renewable energy measures. Each scenario should be evaluated in terms of their energy, emissions, and financial performance to identify a preferred pathway forward. Evaluating and Selecting Decarbonization Strategies offers more detail.
3. Draft a roadmap to decarbonize. Develop a phased roadmap from the selected pathway, outlining when and how decarbonization projects will be implemented, including cost analysis. Ensure the roadmap is adaptable to physical and financial constraints and evolving technologies while securing stakeholder support for effective execution.
4. Assign responsibility to specific teams or individuals. The roadmap should outline specific projects phased into meaningful time periods (such as years or quarters) and illustrate anticipated emissions reduction from those projects.
5. Include potential decarbonization costs, even at a high level, and note key funding cycle or budget request deadlines.
6. Update the roadmap regularly. Things change, and so will your decarbonization progress. Make a commitment to update your decarbonization roadmap at least every five years. You may also need to look at updating your roadmap when there are major infrastructure project changes, regulatory changes, or new funding opportunities.
7. Monitor progress. In the interim, continually monitor key metrics of success during project implementation. Key performance indicators include measured energy and carbon reductions post-implementation, project completion status, and budgeted-versus-actual spending.

Resources

• State University of New York: SUNY Climate and Sustainability Action Plan 2025–2030 [PDF]
• U.S. Department of Energy, Better Buildings Solutions Center: Framework for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Planning: Building Portfolios [PDF]