High-performance Buildings Center of Excellence for California Community Colleges

California’s 116 community colleges will be invited to participate in a community of practice (COP) for high-performance buildings (HPB), sharing best practices in facility operations, sustainability and resilience planning, improved building control strategies, and energy management.  In alignment with the California Community Colleges Board of Governor’s sustainability goals, CREL and the BEST Center will co-lead with LBNL the HPB COP to stimulate improvements in California community colleges’ facilities design, construction, operations, and ongoing capital improvements.

Community colleges are also the primary training ground for the workforce that will build, operate, and maintain the state’s clean energy systems, yet sustainability education is sometimes uneven, underfunded, and disconnected from the research shaping the field. Led by PI Peter Crabtree and Larry Chang, this collaboration leverages CIEE’s research partnerships and the BEST Center’s national network of community college faculty to identify workforce trends and gaps and identify resources to support career education program improvements across the state.

The project connects community college facilities departments, which are often under-resourced, into a statewide network with access to peer expertise, shared best practices, and cutting edge strategies in construction and retrofit projects. It also seeks to embed sustainability and high-performance building concepts into academic and career technical programs to build awareness of the importance of climate change mitigation efforts as well as a core part of how future architects, engineers, and technicians are educated.

A pilot project at Bakersfield College led by BEST used the “campus as living lab” model to  demonstrate how students from multiple disciplines can come together to conduct research on climate change and mitigation efforts on campus highlighting building design, construction, and operations. Twelve architecture, engineering, physics, construction management, accounting, and  computer science undergraduates were organized into interdisciplinary teams and worked  alongside BEST and LBNL experts including an architect, energy researchers, and a building automation specialist to conduct detailed assessments of four campus buildings, examining insulation, lighting, window treatments, HVAC, and building automation systems. The work gave students an end-to-end view of how buildings operate over their useful lifecycle  while confronting the realities of aging systems, incomplete records, and decades of piecemeal upgrades.

The 10-week project culminated in a final presentation, with the broader aim of producing a replicable model that community colleges across California can adopt, using their own campuses as sites of hands-on learning and applied research.