Stack Strategy

**co-written with Steven Mandzik of Navstar**

All federal agencies are facing a sustainability push. President Obama has tasked every Federal Agency for a target in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reductions and sustainability.  This is going to require a tremendous amount of effort.  Navstar and STACK Coordination have a growing expertise in this area to help you with your auditing, planning, and consulting.

The first step in our partnership was to dive into this executive order to see where we can help out. The results were a few best practices in key areas to guide the newly appointed Senior Sustainable Officers. Hopefully, these tidbits can alleviate some pressure as they get a crash course strategic sustainability planning:

Sustainable Contracting – Procurement

Per the order, Federal agencies must:

“Ensure 95% of new contract actions, task orders, and delivery orders for products and services are energy efficient, environmentally preferable, contain recycled content, etc.”

In addition to using EPA recommended Energy Star and EPEAT products. The Regional Municipality of Whistler has developed and implemented an excellent Sustainable Purchasing Guide that uses a six-step decision-making process to help managers make sound decisions. It guides decisions towards those that reduce costs and impacts and ensure long-term success and demonstrates that this seemingly daunting requirement can be met.

Baseline Assessments

The best way to develop a strategic plan is to develop a baseline of energy use. It is quite a challenge to measure your overall energy use, including the new challenge of identifying them as direct (scope 1 and 2) and indirect (scope 3) carbon emissions.

There are lots of programs for measuring carbon out there.  But to be truly effective, you need to study the whole issue of sustainability (including CO2).  The Natural Step Framework and the PROBE for Sustainable Business tool offer ways to comprehensively evaluate and measure your organization’s full impacts (beyond just CO2) and potential for improvement and change. This can provide the much needed longer term, budget focused, understanding of the sustainability challenge.

Reducing Energy Intensity

How to reduce our energy use? Where to start? Who to contact?

Many of these answers can be found in the commercial world. Some key takeaways to keep in mind when searching for ways to increase energy efficiency:

1. Begin by implementing a few proven projects and easy wins to get the ball rolling. Here are some great examples from the Midwest Energy Effeciency Alliance.

2. Bank the savings earned from your early wins and get familiar with the people and information sources that will help you with more difficult projects along the way:

• Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP)
• Flex Your Power
• Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA)

3. Plan for the long-term savings by integrating energy efficiency into ongoing operations with a comprehensive Environmental Management System (EMS).

Zero-Net-Energy Buildings

Getting to net zero – it’s possible, but complex. The tips above help you to reduce the impacts of existing operations and maintenance, but much more can be done in longer term planning. Things like retrofitting our old buildings to designing new buildings. This reaches deep into top-of-the-line strategic planning in building design, construction, operation, management, maintenance, and more.

To meet this challenge is essential to work through the design process with an understanding of how the building, its surroundings and the design team function as a whole. Creating ‘zero-energy,’ ‘green,’ or ‘sustainable,’ development requires extensive coordination to ensure that the building’s various systems work together in an effective way.

The Whole Building Design Guide is a great place to start, as is the GSA Sustainable Design Program.

Even more is possible when we “redesign the design process” as explained in a new book on the integrative design process for green building.

Addressing the Challenge.

Meeting the challenges of Executive Order 13423 will be challenging.  Navstar and STACK Coordination can help your agency develop a strategic plan for addressing it.