Indu, UAlbany's campus energy officer, explains how you turn six million square feet of poorly insulated concrete into a model for large-scale decarbonization by exploiting two key features of university culture: innovation-based problem solving and an inherent optimism that we have the power to make the future better than the present.
Sustainability conversations aren't just about high-minded principles of environmental stewardship. At their core, they are conversations about the mundane, largely unseen building systems that make our climate-controlled lives comfortable every day..
They’re also about policy choices and the political will to make important changes.
UAlbany’s Central Plant, for example, provides heat and hot water to much of the Uptown Campus through gas (and sometimes oil)-fired boilers that pump water at extremely high temperatures and pressures. Hot — as in in 385°F hot.
We got a closer look at that system and the people who maintain it in 2024 when a cracked weld in one of those high-pressure pipes forced the system offline for about 22 hours.
Occasionally leaky pipes aside, that fossil fuel-hungry technology represents the past. If UAlbany and SUNY are going to meet the carbon-reduction goals of New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, big changes need to be made.
To that end, Indu and her colleagues across UAlbany and SUNY are working on ambitious decarbonization plans that would dramatically cut fossil fuel usage by electrifying heating, cooling and hot water delivery on campus. The University is currently seeking $37 million in state funding for the next phase of that project, which would include geothermal wells and new electric chillers and heat exchangers.
That work would be in addition to plans for a new satellite Energy Hub and geothermal field serving UAlbany’s proposed Health Innovation & Technology Building on the other side of campus, which would help sustainably heat and cool adjacent buildings on the Academic Podium home to advanced research facilities.
We already have a model for success. ETEC, UAlbany’s newest and first fully electric research and teaching complex, opened on the Harriman State Office Campus in 2021 and requires no on-site burning of fossil fuels.
In 2023, ETEC was named Green Building of the Year by the U.S. Green Building Council of Upstate New York.
Fittingly, ETEC is also home to most of UAlbany’s climate researchers and the students who will study climate change in the future.
What’s in a name?
To folks in Albany sustainability circles, Indu is a familiar name and face. And if you’ve worked with her (or just listened to this podcast), you’ve noted she goes simply by Indu — no last name, despite the fact that U.S. immigration officials (and our campus email system) have occasionally tried to assign her one. Typically it appears as “Lnu.” But that’s not Indu's last name; it's just an abbreviation for “Last name unknown.”
In part of their conversation that did not make the final edit, Indu explained to Maggie what her name means and its connection to her home in Tamil Nadu, India's southern-most state.
Indu: My full name is Indumathi, which means the light from the moon. I don't have a last name. My father decided against giving any of his children a last name because he did not want our last name to be associated with a caste, which it would have been. He did not want that. So I grew up my entire life with one name, and had no problems. But when I decided to come here to get my master's degree and I went to apply for a visa, the U.S. system would not allow a person with no last name because how else do you track this person? So they assigned me the last name “Lnu.”
UAlbany's Office of Sustainability has a wealth of information about sustainability on campus, including an online dashboard that tracks campus energy usage by building.
UAlbany’s decarbonization efforts have been supported by the New York State Energy Research Development Authority and were recently recognized by the New York League of Conservation Voters.
In 2024, UAlbany was cited as a top performer in the Sustainable Campus Index by the Association for the Advanced of Sustainability in Higher Education (ASHE). You can read UAlbany’s latest report here in ASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System.
In 2022, UAlbany completed the largest rooftop solar array in the entire SUNY system.
UAlbany's first geothermal building, Liberty Terrace Apartments, opened in 2012.
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Interview by Margaret Hartley
Hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
[0:01] Host: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:19] Indu: We have to act. We have the tools, we have the technology, we have the solutions. It's the will to act. It's to say there is a cost to doing nothing. Business as usual is not an answer.
[0:34] Host: Faced with rising utility bills — and, I hope, at least some concern for the planet — many of us have grappled with how to make our homes more energy efficient. But it's hard to know where to start. It can all feel a little overwhelming: insulation, HVAC systems, air sealing, the list goes on.
Does it make sense to trim shade trees for solar panels? Will a heat pump ever pay off? Even if it won't, should we do it anyway?
Now, imagine that exercise for 6 million or so square feet of concrete buildings, originally built with almost no insulation and heated with absurdly hot water. Now you know what it's like to be Indu.
Indu is UAlbany's energy officer. It's her job to reduce and eventually eliminate the fossil fuels burned to light, heat and cool our campus. In Indu’s words, she's responsible for keeping people comfortable and happy while also trying to make the Earth happy.
That includes more than 7,000 resident students who expect on-demand hot showers and hundreds of scientists who depend on the reliable operation of high-tech research facilities. You, for example, don't have a particle accelerator in your basement. Indu does.
Indu is pretty optimistic. She chooses to see UAlbany's biggest sustainability challenges as opportunities to make big strides toward cutting our fossil fuel consumption through upgrades that need to happen anyway.
The challenge facing UAlbany is a lot like the challenge facing New York state more generally as it chases ambitious climate goals. How do we decarbonize on budgets that work?
It turns out that universities, which thrive on that scientific cycle of experimentation and innovation-based problem solving, are natural test beds for this.
For Earth Week, my colleague Maggie Hartley spoke to Indu about how you UAlbany has helped lead the way on decarbonization; the instant feedback — both good and bad — that comes from working with students; and why she says sustainability isn't a task to check off a list but something we should bake into the way we live our daily lives.
Happy Earth Week, everyone. Here's Maggie and Indu.
[2:45] Maggie Hartley: You're the energy officer at the University at Albany. What does that mean? What do you do here? What's your mission here?
[2:53] Indu: So my primary mission is to figure out how we can reduce our carbon footprint from the built environment. So built environment is our buildings, our sites and any activity that we do within those buildings. So we have to heat and cool those buildings. We have to light those buildings. We have to provide fresh air for the occupants in the buildings. We have to plug in equipment that the occupants might want to use in the buildings. Figuring out how we can reduce the energy that is used by all of these systems that we need to function as a campus and therefore reduce the carbon footprint from that energy usage.
[3:32] Maggie Hartley: Tell me a little bit about how you got here. What's your background? How did you end up here at Albany? How did you end up in this field?
[3:39] Indu: I have a bachelor's in architecture. I worked as an architect in India for a couple of years, and as part of that I would go out on site to inspect the projects and how they were coming along. And I really enjoyed the process. I liked the process of putting things on a piece of paper, but I really liked them coming to life and going and seeing them in 3D. So I then decided to get a master's degree in construction management. So that was the reason I came to this country, was to get my master's in construction management. And I started working for a contractor in California after I finished my master's. One of the first projects was $160 million California Transportation headquarters. This was back in the early 2000s, and California at that time started to require that all their state buildings be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified, which was very new back then.
And we had no idea what that meant or what it would take for us to build a building to lead standards. And me being new in the company, I raised my hand and I said, “I can take that on.” So I started to do more research into LEED, and we achieved LEED silver on that project. So we did it. Now, I had found a new way of how we can design and construct our buildings so that they meet the occupants’ need, they make us happy, they make us productive, but at the same time, they make the Earth happy. They make the environment happy. Whether it's the carbon footprint or the ecological footprint of our buildings, how can we bring all of those pieces together? So I switched gears once again and started doing this.
[5:22] Maggie Hartley: This built environment was built mostly 60 years ago, mostly out of poured concrete, and as far as I understand, without a lot of insulation.
[5:33] Indu: That is correct.
[5:34] Maggie Hartley: So what is your biggest challenge with these old buildings?
[5:39] Indu: I think you touched on that, Maggie. So this whole campus was a master planned campus, which means that most of the footprint that you see on the campus today was built all at once within a very short window, within a five- to 10-year window. So the biggest challenge is that now this entire stock of 6 million square feet is aging at the same time, and all the systems in all of these buildings are coming to the end of their useful life at the same time. So that is the biggest challenge is you have a huge deferred maintenance or infrastructure renewal cost coming up, which is a challenge. But it is also a great opportunity. And the reason I say that is now we're embarking on the Climate Action Plan implementation, which requires a lot of investment in infrastructure renewal because we're going to change the way we've been heating our buildings, the way we have been cooling our buildings.
We're going to completely rethink how we do that in order for us to get to the net-zero carbon goals. So now instead of looking at the deferred maintenance and the infrastructure-renewal cost us a challenge — when is the best time to replace your fridge at home with a more energy-efficient fridge? When it is coming to the end of its useful life. You just have to spend a tiny bit extra to get the Energy STAR, but you were going to spend the money on the fridge anyway. So I think we're at the same point now with our buildings where we have to do something about this failing infrastructure anyway. Why not spend a tiny bit more to get them so that not only do we have new systems in place, but they're also more energy efficient and they meet our larger goals?
[7:26] Maggie Hartley: How will they be more energy efficient? Are you talking about different systems — different kinds of heating and cooling systems?
[7:33] Indu: So right now most of our campus gets its heating and cooling from the Central Plant. And the Central Plant relies on natural gas, which is a fossil fuel, to provide heating to all of our buildings. And we heat up water using natural gas to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's the water that we pipe to all of the buildings so that they can get the heating that they need. You cannot generate 400-degree water without burning some sort of fossil fuel. So how do you get away from that? ETEC and Liberty are two very good examples where we have shown that it is possible to have a building fully heated and cooled without relying on any on-site fossil-fuel combustion. But in order for us to move in that direction, like I said, you cannot heat your buildings with 400-degree water anymore. You need to get to a lower-temperature water system. You can maybe get to 160 degrees, and then you can use an electric heat pump to generate that 160-degree water for you. But in order for us to do that, we have to now get inside every single building, rip out the heating systems that we have, put in new systems that can accept this 160 degrees and still meet the heating loads of the building, hat's how we're going to get there is basically changing the heating systems in the building.
[8:54] Maggie Hartley: Is there something beneficial about being in a university setting for this kind of work as opposed to being in a corporate setting or being in a municipal setting?
[9:06] Indu: Absolutely. I think what sets us apart is that we are a institution of higher education. We're always striving to learn more, and in that process we are more willing to accept certain failures. And as universities, we accept that. We accept that as people, as institutions, we're going to make mistakes, but we're going to learn from it, and we're going to move the industry forward. That is our mission. We're always doing that in our research, in our teaching. So I think even in implementation, we've absorbed some of that ethos and we say, “It's okay if this thing didn't work out, but at least we learned from it.” So that's one. And because we have that kind of culture, and that's the culture not just at the University at Albany but across the higher education landscape, that I am able to pick up my phone and call anybody anywhere in the country within a higher education setting and ask them, “Hey, did this work for you? What lessons did you learn?” And there is no competition. They’re willing to openly share. So I think this comradery, the network that you have to learn from each other, definitely I think is unique to higher education. And plus our students — they're our biggest motivators and they're right here. Unlike the corporations, where you have customers that you may never meet, our students are right here. They don't like something, they'll tell you. If they're happy and proud, they'll tell you that, too. So I think that having our customers, our students, right here and then giving us that feedback continuously, I think that's also a great motivator for us to stay on track and keep our promises.
[10:48] Maggie Hartley: You sometimes talk to children, young people, about sustainability, about the future of the planet. I understand you sometimes make them cry —
[10:59] Indu: Once. Once!
[11:01] Maggie Hartley: Tell me about that.
[11:04] Indu: So I had an elementary school teacher invite me to do a presentation on climate action and climate goal. And I had prepared what I thought was a wonderful presentation where the first half of the presentation was basically laying out all the facts, the bare facts, of how dire the situation is. And the latter part of the presentation was a more hopeful presentation of even though the situation is dire, we have been successful, and look at what we have to do in the future to get us to a carbon neutral place. And so by the time I got done with my first half of the presentation and I was like, OK, I looked into the room and I saw a couple of kids crying, really sad because I was talking about not just the planet, but I was talking about their future. I was talking about polar bears, things that they care about.
So again, know your audience. I didn't. I did not read the room. I did not know my audience. I talked to them like I talked to adults, and I shouldn't have. Yes, I felt very badly about that. And that was the only time I've ever made children cry because I learned my lesson. But the positive that came out of that — one of the students that cried in that class, she is now senior in high school getting ready to go to college. And because of how she felt in that moment, both powerless but also powerful, knowing that she can make a difference, she has now decided to go into environmental science and engineering.
[12:44] Maggie Hartley: So on campus we have students who are learning about sustainability. It's baked into a lot of our different kinds of courses. Do you ever work directly with students? Do you have students working with you on projects?
[12:57] Indu: Absolutely, I do. So there's a few ways that I interact with our students. Many of the faculty would ask me to come into their classroom and then either do a PowerPoint presentation or, in many cases, and what I enjoy is actually a show-and-tell-type presentation.
[13:14] Maggie Hartley: Do you make them cry?
[13:15] Indu: I do not.
[13:17] Maggie Hartley: Just checking. Just checking.
[13:19] Indu: I bring them to the Central Plant. So I show them the old ways of doing things, of burning fossil fuels to create heat. And they literally can look into the generator to see the giant flame that is inside burning to heat up the water to the 400 degrees. So I show them the old system, and then I take them to our newer buildings and I show them how we can get away from burning fossil fuels. How can we make our buildings more energy efficient and sustainable. So I really like those kind of classes where I'm actually showing them systems in action.
[13:52] Maggie Hartley: It sounds like you take them to ETEC.
[13:54] Indu: I take them to ETEC. I take them to Massry. I take them to the Central Plant, I take them to the Campus Center, and I show them some of our green infrastructure practices. So climate adaptation measures, not just mitigation, but green roofs and porous pavements and roof gardens. Oh, sorry, rain gardens. So I do show them things in action. We literally pour a bucket of water on a regular parking lot and then a porous parking lot and see the difference. So that's one way I interact with them. The other way is we collect a lot of data on our buildings. We collect data every 15 minutes on thousands of points across our buildings. So I share this data with the students and I meet with them and I explain the dataset to them, and then they get to analyze the data. They get to tell me if the Liberty geothermal system has been performing as well as we thought it would. Is the system balanced? If the system is out of balance, what can we do to bring it back into balance? And then the third way I work with the students is I usually have one- to two interns working at my office, and they're working on very specific projects, doing the research, figuring out the best practices, calling other people that have done that to collect lessons learned, and then coming up with recommendations for our campus. Every single student that has gone through the internship in the last 10 years is now successfully working in the energy and environmental industry and doing absolutely amazing.
[15:31] Maggie Hartley: What kind of fields are there out there for people who want to make a difference?
[15:36] Indu: Every field. Sustainability shouldn't be something that we do. It should be something that we are. Every single thing, every single activity can be made more sustainable. So I think that this idea that you have to be in certain fields, you have to be an engineer. That's not true. You can be an accountant, you can be an environmental scientist, a researcher, that is working on this field. You can be a teacher that is teaching. You can be a writer that writes about this. With both climate action and with the ecological issues that we are facing, these are multifaceted global problems. So the solutions also need to be multifaceted. You cannot look at it from just a single lens. You have to look at it from the affordability lens. You have to look at it from the financial lens. You have to look at it from the technical sense. The problem is complex. So the solution inherently has to be complex. And when you have a complex problem, you do need input from a variety of different types of thinkers and doers. So I think everybody who wants to get engaged in this field absolutely can.
[16:47] Host: That was Indu, our campus energy officer and in-house expert on how we're retrofitting UAlbany's iconic 1960s architecture to meet 21st-century sustainability standards.
To learn why Indu’s father insisted she have just one name, and to read more about that insanely high-temperature heating system on campus, be sure to check out The Longer Version in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including for this episode: research and an interview conducted by Maggie Hartley and audio editing and production by Scott Freedman in the UAlbany Digital Media Studio, located deep inside the Podium tunnels. To find us, you just need to follow those massive hot water pipes.
We'll be back next week with another conversation about something interesting. I'm Jordan Carleo- Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.