Smart Buildings, Green Campus: Reducing Campus Emissions with Smart Technology

Nine years remain to reach the goal of campus-wide carbon neutrality. In order to make substantial progress in maintaining that deadline, immediately addressing the emissions of buildings that account for the majority of UMass Amherst’s carbon footprint, is imperative to ensure the timeline remains possible. One means of achieving this goal is retrofitting buildings with smart technologies. At UMass, heat over-expenditure results in a large portion of carbon emissions and energy waste. Fortunately, the technology and resources are now available and accessible to reinvent exactly that cycle by retrofitting existing buildings with green adaptations.

Green building alternatives are available to apply to existing buildings, rather than having to demolish and rebuild these campus facilities, effectively overspending time and money. By installing smart technologies such as self-automated HVAC-heating systems, not only will it prevent the current programming of systematic overheating, but it will ensure that heat energy wasted will be rerouted into outlets where it can be utilized.

Remaining stagnant with the current rate of building retrofit will result in the guaranteed negligence of the 2030 neutrality deadline and in increasing levels of preventable heat entropy polluting the campus environment. Implementing smart technologies in the buildings that span the nearly-1500 acres of campus will immediately mitigate a large portion of emissions and keep on track to not only meet the 2030 deadline but the less-forgiving deadline of irreversible climate change that our planet faces.