Open Collections

Prepared for : UBC Building Operations

University of British Columbia. Campus and Community Planning

In January 2017, Cloud9 Consulting was approached by UBC Building Operations (Building Ops) to devise a plan to reach the emission target goals set out by the Climate Action Plan. The brief given was: How should UBC create a significantly more efficient and cost effective fleet of vehicles, while simultaneously dramatically reducing fleet vehicle greenhouse gas emissions? ABOUT THE CLIENT UBC Building Ops is the on-campus maintenance organization who manages a large fleet of vehicles for the campus. Through partnerships and economies of scale, the organization is able to achieve low costs for vehicles, fuel and maintenance services. UBC Building Ops has reduced emissions by 45% since 2007, though they have a ways to go to hit their targets for the future. Most importantly, 54% of all campus vehicles are owned outside of the organization, making hitting future targets more challenging. The largest issue Building Ops is facing currently, is that not all faculties within UBC share the same vision on reaching the emissions targets. Even if they did, Building Ops has no way to monitor their progress as many of their vehicles are outside the organization’s fleet. This main problem leads to three major symptoms, which include: 1. Emissions per vehicle still remain too high 2. Too many UBC-owned vehicles are on campus 3. Internal operations are not optimized for campus Cloud9 has executed primary and secondary research in order to provide recommendations for Building Ops moving forward. ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATIONS All recommendations by Cloud9 will be focusing on the 2050 goal of zero emissions. Though the 2020 benchmark is much sooner, Cloud9 has discovered that costs associated with focusing on two separate goals will be much higher than focusing on the second of the two. With the recommendations in place for 2050, 2020 goals will simultaneously be achieved. Building Ops is not yet in a position to fully centralize all vehicles on UBC, mainly, because there are departments who are opposed to joining, despite the clear data on costs savings and the benefit associated with the centralized fleet. Cloud9 initially considered an incentive program or cap and trade to either incentivise or nudge the faculties into joining, though we quickly understood that this may be seen as coercion and may not be adopted fondly by the faculties. That being said, our recommendations are built around the non-member faculties owning their own car, though attempting to create a shared values with Building Ops to achieve the emission targets. Recommendation alternatives were evaluated based on their ability to lower the symptoms outlined above, and include their ability to: 1. Lower greenhouse gas emissions 2. Reduce fleet size 3. Optimization of the Building Ops system After careful consideration and analysis, the three recommendations are as follows: 1. Remove fossil fuel vehicles and collect data 2. Reduce fleet size 3. Optimize campus operations Though these are lofty goals, Cloud9 has outlined tactics to make each recommendation realistic and ready to be implemented. Recommendation 1: Remove fossil fuel vehicles and collect data Recommendation one is built around government subsidized programs to incentivise car owners to trade in their vehicle for a clean energy vehicle. Using these governmental programs in junction with a Building Ops subsidy should be enough of an incentive for faculties to switch out their vehicles. The only request from Building Ops, would be that the faculty insert a telematics device in their car for solely the purpose of data collection. This recommendation will work because it is enough of an incentive to sway the faculties to move to non-GHG emitting vehicles, while Building Ops has slightly more control over the vehicles that are not associated with Building Ops. The data collected will be used to further improve the system moving forward. Recommendation 2: Reduce fleet size There is a binding constraint to fully electrifying all on-campus vehicles, and that is the lack of infrastructure to support it (charging stations, power, etc.). Our second recommendation is the introduction of Veemo bikes by Velometro. Unlike other bike sharing programs such as Mobi, Veemo provides a car-like experience using solar panels on the roof to generate electricity. Veemo’s enclosed, electric-assist and three-wheeled vehicle is regulated as a bicycle. These bikes have the ability to replace vehicles for small, nearby jobs. Veemo is already partnered with UBC to conduct a test run of the bikes Spring 2017. Building Ops shouldn’t have a problem receiving a few vehicles to add to their fleet on a test-basis. Recommendation 3: Optimize campus operations Our last recommendation focuses on long-term costs. Cloud9 recommends Building Ops take the data collected from our first recommendation, and use it to create a centralized deployment application to improve efficiency. Building Ops currently function with 9 different platforms, this program will reduce the need of an employee to manage and deploy the vehicles. Cloud9 takes these strategies and tactics into further depth in this report. This plan lays the groundwork to reach UBC’s 2050 goal of zero emissions, as well as key metrics and change management. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

Text

UBC Social Ecological Economic Development Studies (SEEDS) Student Report; University of British Columbia. COMM 486M

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0356645

Other UBC

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/