Olivia Herron
I really think there is a place for everyone in this movement. If you live on Earth, you should care about sustainability, and you can integrate it into your career.

President Greg Crawford
Hello, I'm Greg Crawford, president of Miami University, and welcome to "In Such a Place," the podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. What will Miami University look like in 2060, and how about the year 2100? And how do we prepare today for a future where we know will be very different than today's world, joining us today is Olivia Herron, Miami's director of sustainability. Olivia has co-authored the Miami 2040 Plan. This plan sets an ambitious goal for the university to achieve carbon neutrality. Her work is about more than energy and emissions. It's about how a university supports sustainability. Well, welcome to the podcast, Olivia. It's great to have you here.

Olivia Herron
Thank you. I'm excited to get to talk with you today.

President Greg Crawford
Tell us a little bit about your journey from the perspective of you graduated from Miami and you go off and work somewhere else, and then boom, you get an opportunity to return to your alma mater and to work on what you so love, which is sustainability. So, tell us how it felt to come back.

Olivia Herron
It was so exciting to get to return to campus during my own sister's freshman year as a student here at Miami. So, it was a really special time for my family to have us back in this community and to be here advancing, you know, work that I got to work on as a graduate student. The climate emergency is ever urgent. There is a lot of efforts that higher education needs to make across the board, and being at a school that's inspiring other institutions is really meaningful.

President Greg Crawford
Well, that's great. We're so happy to have you back. I've heard you talk about I heard you talk a lot, in fact. But tell us about Clarksville, Tennessee, and you called it at one point Miami's climate sister city. Can you explain that in more detail, please?

Olivia Herron
Yes. So there was a really fantastic research project from a nonprofit called Climate Central, and they wanted to help people visualize what climate change is going to mean for the weather in their home state. So I can tell you that it's going to be eight degrees warmer on average during the summer, but it's really hard to visualize what eight degrees really means it's a lot easier for us to give an example of a sister city. So our weather in 2060 will be like what the weather was in Clarksville, Tennessee, when I was living there in 2020. And an example of what that looks like: we average 20 days above 90 degrees here in Oxford during the summertime. Clarksville averages 50 days above 90 degrees every summer, and we know that there are all kinds of impacts to our campus. My freshman dorm, Scott Hall, was not air conditioned. We now have air conditioning in all of our residence halls on campus. That is going to be vitally important if we are living in a world where we have 50 days above 90 every summer. So a lot of our resilience and adaptation planning has been how do we keep students comfortable, keep them learning, keep them safely practicing for athletics in a warmer world.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I'm not so sure I'm ready for those hot days after this summer.

Olivia Herron
Yes, I was an avid kayaker in Clarksville because there was no activity off the water that I wanted to do in the summertime, and I guess I'm going to be busting that back out here someday in the future.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah. Well, traditionally, sustainability is all about preventing environmental damage. So, tell us about how resilience and adaptation play a key role in that.

Olivia Herron
Yes. So, just last week, the United Nations announced that the 1.5 degrees Celsius target for the Paris Agreement is no longer achievable. The world is already going to warm more than that 1.5 degrees Celsius, and so we have to be prepared. Air conditioning is a really good example that I think everyone can relate to and understand. That you know, if it's going to be hotter, we need all of our buildings to be air conditioned to operate comfortably, and that just continues in resilience and adaptation for plants and animals, you might have seen. I've heard from a lot of students, or they've asked me if I saw the armadillo that was found in Oxford, and that's another example. So armadillos were super common in Clarksville. I would see them all the time. That's their native range. As it's warming up. Creatures are coming farther north that we're not used to seeing. So, in 2060, a Miami student will be trying to keep armadillos out of their trash cans instead of raccoons. These are, you know, easy to digest anecdotes, but I think they give you a really good idea of how life is going to be different. Another like cool student project that just happened this summer was with the city of Oxford. They have a list of trees that they choose from when they're gonna you know a tree dies, they need to replace it in the community. They have this list of acceptable trees. We just updated it. It's mostly trees from Tennessee today because trees are gonna live 50 or 100 years. It would be too hot for them if we planted traditional Ohio species into the future. So we're going to start planting trees from Tennessee so that they are prepared for weather in Oxford in the future.

President Greg Crawford
So as a university, we're constantly making decisions, and then during our Miami Thrive strategic plan, you know we did future-back planning, which meant you know we looked out to 2040 and we said, what do students need then, and how do we prepare today? But when we talk to you, Olivia, and talk about sustainability, we're talking 2060, 2080, 2100. So tell us about how you make decisions and how the university should make decision for a future that's way off.

Olivia Herron
I feel really lucky to be at a long-standing institution and having these conversations. Right, we know Miami was here 100 years ago, and so I have every reason to believe that Miami will still be here in 100 years. And data and science give us the tools that we need. It's intimidating sometimes. 2060 sounds far away, but if I'm lucky enough to retire from Miami, I'll still be working here in 2060. So this is all within you know the realm of my personal career and looking at climate modeling and reports that come from scientists like those we have here on campus in IES, we have the oldest Master of Environmental Science program in the country, and we have a lot of history and legacy to look back on and help us think about the future. You know, 40 years from now, and you're exactly right. I feel really privileged to look backwards and say, "Well, what were students worried about 40 years ago, and how have we met those expectations?" So, we know it's going to be warmer. We know that our rain events are going to be more intense. So, you know, a heavy rain day is going to yield more inches of rain than maybe we're used to right now, and we have to prepare campus infrastructure to keep students safe and comfortable, and allow them to flourish in the world as it'll be in the future.

President Greg Crawford
So I'm going to ask you a pre question before my next question...

Olivia Herron
Okay.

President Greg Crawford
...setting up what we do here at Miami. But you know, many organizations will participate in sustainability through what's called carbon offsets. Can you define carbon offsets for our audience right now?

Olivia Herron
I am so happy you asked this question. So, carbon offsets are financially supporting a project or initiative that are supposed to be reducing carbon emissions somewhere else in the world, an example that you might be familiar with is planting trees in the Amazon rainforest. I think in the early 2010s that was like the quintessential carbon offset. Everybody thought about planting trees, you know, in some far-flung place. But what we have learned through major corporations like Microsoft and Google, who went through pretty substantial damage to their reputation, because it turned out that their carbon offsetting programs were not legitimate. If I said that it was offsetting 100 metric tons of carbon emissions, somebody actually went to that rainforest in the Amazon, and they said you never planted any trees, or you did, and then you stopped taking care of them, and so they you know failed to to survive into their first year, and so carbon offsetting has come under more and more scrutiny in recent years. It's not regulated by the government or any sort of big body that consistently oversees it, there are some small niche firms trying to do validation. I don't want to, you know, speak poorly of their work because I'm sure they are working very hard. But it is much harder to put emissions out in the atmosphere and then try to put the genie back in the bottle by removing emissions somewhere else in the world than it is to just not release those you know climate pollutants in the first place.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, well that's great. So many universities actually have strategies around offsets, but ours here at Miami was very different. We made major investments. Geothermal and of recently solar infrastructure through the generous gift of Sharon and Graham Mitchell for the sustainability park on the Western Campus. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about Miami's strategy to make investments in these technologies versus the offset strategy.

Olivia Herron
We took the long path. It takes time, planning, diligence, lots of penciling numbers from Cody Powell and our friends in the utilities group to achieve this long-range strategy in a financially sustainable way for the institution. So back when I would have been in kindergarten. Someone with way more foresight than me made the utilities group at Miami University an auxiliary unit. So that means that they have to, you know, support their own costs. That means that they charge people for energy. Charging people for energy is great because if you're paying a bill, you're worried about not overusing energy. You can save yourself money in your budget if you use less power on campus, and that has allowed us to fund these really ambitious projects. We have two major geothermal plants on campus. They're serving 36% of our campus square footage with sustainable heating and cooling, and now we're producing some of our own electricity through the Mitchells' Park. So we have definitely taken the road less traveled, but it's been very exciting to get to bring other institutions to campus. Just this summer, we had seven Ohio peer institutions on campus touring the Mitchell Sustainability Park, talking about their very unique program to keep the savings from the energy and put it into a donor-directed endowment, which I think is super unique to Miami University and speaks to our vision for sustainability and how energy conservation is the future for higher education.

President Greg Crawford
That is great. I love our strategy. And then there's one thing about geothermal that I don't like, and I want you to talk about that.

Olivia Herron
Okay.

President Greg Crawford
But the first thing is that solar panels you walk by, you see them.

Olivia Herron
Yes.

President Greg Crawford
And the geothermal side, unfortunately, you don't see anything. It's all underground, and so you know we like to brag about this investment. So, how do you talk to this about potentially future students or trying to recruit that high school senior coming to Miami? What do you tell them about all this underground infrastructure that you can't see, but how beneficial it is to the university?

Olivia Herron
That is a great question, and it is our greatest struggle. I would say. You know, we have this amazing asset that the students can't necessarily see, and putting the solar on top of it has definitely helped with the visibility of the Western geothermal installation. But being at their new student orientation, talking with them about geothermal, making sure they understand what it means that we care about their future. We're preserving the earth for them, and for them to have you know flourishing adult lives and careers is important. And so it does take some effort and some education to teach them about a technology that they might not be familiar with. I think I'm the oddball. My parents own an HVAC company, so I grew up. You know, kitchen table talk for us was about heating and cooling buildings. That is probably not our typical student experience, and I know that. So sometimes I jokingly will tell them, which is based on a true story, that I brought a fifth-grade Boy Scout troop to the Western Geothermal plant for a tour, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how do we explain geothermal to fifth graders. But boy, was it worth my time? Because if fifth graders understand what I mean, then I can explain it to just about anybody. So I like to say that we're using the dirt as the cheapest battery you can possibly imagine. The earth is an affordable place to store thermal energy, and if you've ever stood in front of your refrigerator when it's running really hard and it's blowing hot air out at your feet, then you already know half of what it takes to make geothermal work. Air conditioning is pushing heat out of your hot buildings instead of just discharging that to the atmosphere as a waste. We are storing it in the ground as a valuable resource because we have seasons here in Ohio. We're pulling heat out of the buildings half the year. We're pushing heat into the buildings half of the year. And so, if we can store heat for later instead of burning fossil fuels or using electricity, we save a lot of money and are a much more efficient campus.

President Greg Crawford
Talk to us a little bit about these the difficult climate realities, and you're trying to explain all this to various people, and the technology is complicated. We hear a little bit about geothermal and semiconductors for solar cells, complicated. But how do you speak about sustainability to the layperson, and you know, without leaving them behind or leaving them confused or without leaving them out of the conversation?

Olivia Herron
Absolutely. So I really try to emphasize with our students that any career can be a climate career. So it doesn't matter what students are studying. I guess maybe with the exception of our few Astronaut Scholars, I always say that their careers will take place on Earth, and so they have a place in the environment, in sustainability, in thinking about how whatever industry they want to go into can be more conscientious of its environmental impact. So I really think there is a place for everyone in this movement. If you live on Earth, you should care about sustainability, and you can integrate it into your career. So, I actually just had a great call with a student this morning who took one of my classes and said, "Olivia, I'm really wanting to get into biofuels." That is so out of my realm of expertise, but I was so honored that she reached out to me and said, "I'm thinking about this for graduate school. What questions should I be asking?" And it is so fun to get to work with our students to say, "Okay, this is your passion area. Let's brainstorm how we can connect it to sustainability." And so far, I haven't had a student stump me on how we can connect their dreams and their goals and their careers to making their industry more environmentally friendly can definitely be overwhelming. But I think it's super helpful to know and to remember that we've overcome really big challenges as humans. You know, in history, just recently we all came together so effectively, especially you know on campus during COVID. I finished my master's degree online because of the changes and the pivot that we all made to remote learning, and it really proved to me that when people come together around an issue, we can get a lot accomplished pretty quickly.

President Greg Crawford
Well said. So let's continue on the student discussion. When we had our strategic planning session, talked to hundreds, probably 1000s of students, and experiential learning was a big deal for all of them. They love to learn by doing, and I know you do too. So tell us a little bit about experiential learning from the perspective of our waste reduction plan programs on campus, and how students get involved and what they learn.

Olivia Herron
Yes. So waste reduction planning is the name of the game for me this year. I'm thinking a lot about waste, and in many ways, it's a homecoming, like many things for me at Miami, my own capstone on campus was thinking about how we could compost food waste from the dining halls. And one of my first initiatives when I got to campus was implementing composting in the Armstrong Student Center. So I really like to make sure students know that I have the experience of doing a capstone project that I got to see the implementation of my project, and then I really hope that they will get that same experience because it's part of your legacy on campus as a Miamian. It's so cool to get to come back as an alum and to point out to your spouse or your kids or your friends like that's the lasting impact that I had on Miami. So I'm working with a team of four master's students this school year, and just like we have a climate action plan for carbon emissions on campus, they're helping me write a waste reduction plan. So how do we be more thoughtful about what we send to the Rumpke landfill? We know that those materials are going to be in our neighbors' backyards for hundreds, if not 1000s, of years, and so we should think about that as a really precious resource. There are some things that are best put in the landfill; that's the safest place for them because they don't leak out into the environment. But there are some things that we could reduce on the front end that could have less packaging. We could make our processes so that we can reuse materials, repair materials, and so waste is something that every single one of us is involved in. You know, every day you brush your teeth, and that toothpaste tube is going to have to go somewhere when you're done with it, and so it's something that students care a lot about. It's something I get a lot of student questions about, and I think that there are going to be a lot of careers in waste management and packaging engineering moving forward. We've got a tenant in College@Elm, who actually makes packaging out of paper so that it is recyclable instead of having to be landfilled like plastic. So I'm very very excited for students to learn all the ins and outs and complicated things they probably never thought about. You know, going to class last year, and then this year they'll be experts in Miami's waste stream, and they always have ideas that I wouldn't think of.

President Greg Crawford
That's great. Well, we know you're passionate about sustainability. That's super clear. Your enthusiasm for this topic is infectious. So I wanted to ask you this because I've heard you talk about this before, but you talk a lot about no matter what students choose for a career path, you think sustainability can be a part of it, and also when students are training at an institution of higher ed while they're in college, they can be thinking about it or doing something about it, independent upon their major. So tell us in the big picture the role of higher ed, sort of in your vision for the future for training students and educating them about sustainability.

Olivia Herron
Yes, I love the breadth of education that Miami students get, and I so hope that they will take something away that will help them make informed decisions about where they want to start their career, what industry they want to go in. We just saw from the New York Times they rated the 72 largest cities in the world for their climate preparedness. Chicago is the number one city in the world for climate preparedness. I sure hope that they like me stick around in the Midwest in the future. The Midwest is actually where it's where it's at. We don't have hurricanes. We do not have you know hot summers like they do in Alabama right now. So it's going to get warmer everywhere. But warmer here is going to be much more tolerable than warmer in Florida. So there are all kinds of impacts to their lives in the future, like their ability to get homeowners insurance. If they're in an area that's super prone to wildfire, they might lose. You know, most people's nest egg is their family home, and if it's in an area where you can't get insurance and it's burned down by a wildfire, those are the kinds of things that I hope students can learn in their like general education science courses, so that they are more prepared citizens to make good decisions in their lives in the future.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, and so when students participate in this during their college careers, what do they gain? What do they walk away with? What does the accountant who goes and works in the accountancy industry gain from taking a sustainability course.

Olivia Herron
So, boy, do I wish that I had more accounting training. You would not believe how similar doing a greenhouse gas emissions inventory is to doing accounting. So, I hope that our students will realize that analytical skills, science skills, communication skills, education. You know, I also hope that our teachers will go out into our schools and teach children to love the environment, to be excited for their futures, to want to participate in STEM. Those are the things that we need to have a bright future, to have new technologies that are going to make our hot new world more comfortable. I'm sure there are things I haven't even dreamed up yet that some Miami education major today is going to inspire a kid who isn't even born yet to invent something that is going to make everybody's lives better in the future.

President Greg Crawford
Every day, every minute, there seems like AI, AI, AI. That's all we hear, and it's interesting from your perspective of sustainability. And there's kind of two things going on. One is that it can be used as a tool to really help us with sustainability planning and also execution. And also, AI is going to take a lot of energy in the future as we keep using more and more of it. So, talk to us about exactly what AI does in the sustainability space and how you see the future of AI?

Olivia Herron
AI is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. So you're completely correct that it uses a lot of energy, and it can, but doesn't have to use a lot of water. So a great example is the Tallinn cluster that is here in the Hoyt data center. It's being cooled using Miami's existing geothermal system. It's closed loop. We are not evaporating water or wasting water, and I hope that we will be a demonstration for other larger installations that you know we can make. More environmentally friendly choices in how we choose to build our AI infrastructure. It's also hard because the industry is in such a rush to grow that sometimes there are AI data centers that are powered by things like diesel generators. There might not be enough grid electricity in a community, but for some other reason, it's a good spot for an AI data center, and so they are putting in pretty polluting, fossil fuel burning temporary infrastructure so that we can get AI off the ground as quickly as possible. So it is probably, hopefully, its most polluting right now. It'll take time to build solar panels to power AI data centers, but it is so worth pursuing because we can make AI as sustainable as we want it to be. If we build green power, then we can power green AI. There just has to be public demand and public expectation that we say we want AI, but we want AI that is not climate polluting. And so far, I think a lot of the excitement that I share about what AI can do, all of the good things that it can bring to us have sometimes taken the front seat, and we've forgotten about. Now we're burning 1000s of gallons of diesel fuel to make this happen as fast as we possibly can. You're also totally correct that it is going to help us solve sustainability problems in the future. We know that it's useful in formulating medicine. I so hope that there's someone out there applying AI to formulating better plastics that are more recyclable, or better controls for air conditioning systems, so that they're on when we need them and they're off when we don't. There are lots of ways that we can use AI to make things more sustainable today. We just have to make sure that when we're building the AI, we're also thinking about sustainability.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I just ask you. Let's follow up on that on our data center here at Miami because that's fascinating what we're doing there. And so, you know, these things take a lot of power, and there's a lot of heat that's generated. Can you, at a high level, follow that heat through after it's generated in our data center and where you put it, and how we use it? And the second part of that question is: Are we unique with this, and are is this experiment useful or translatable to others?

Olivia Herron
So to explain the data center at Hoyt Hall and how it is connected to our geothermal plant. It depends on what time of year it is. So in the summertime, when we're air conditioning buildings, we're going to take the heat off of those computers and we're going to store it in the ground for the winter. If it is computing in the winter time when we need heat, we can take heat directly off of those computers and send it to our residence halls to send it to the academic buildings that are close by. I can envision a future where we build an AI data center and we build a brand new neighborhood next to it, and all of those homes are heated using the waste heat from the computer systems, but we have to have houses right next to the data center to make that work. So it is a transferable technology. I know that Microsoft is playing around already with geothermal type cooling for some of their AI centers, but it really is the cutting edge of this new technology, and so it's special that students get to learn about it here at Miami. That they can go see it. That they can be part of research projects that are going to make AI more sustainable in the future. The pause, maybe that I have, or the caveat the asterisks that I give to our students is that they have to remember just because we are proving it's possible doesn't mean that the AI that they might use on their laptop at home isn't environmentally damaging. So when you log on to ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini, your preferred AI, you don't know where that data center is in the world. You don't know if it's diesel powered or solar powered. You don't know how the neighbors next to the data center felt about it being built, and so it's exciting and innovative that we are demonstrating that AI can be more sustainable here at Miami, but I also tell students to keep in mind that doesn't make the AI that they use on their laptop at home any more sustainable.

President Greg Crawford
So I always love this event at Miami. It's every year during Alumni Weekend, and we have graduates from 50 years before. And it's so fun to hear their stories and everything. And most importantly, I love to hear the stories about how much they think things have changed, or even how things have stayed the same. So let's look to the future. The graduating class this year, 50 years from now, when they return to Miami for their 50th anniversary, tell us what the campus will look like then when they come back to view it 50 years later.

Olivia Herron
Isn't that exciting to think about the impacts and the decisions that we're making today are going to be part of that legacy? And I hope and really believe that sustainability is going to be more part of people's everyday lives in ways that they don't even realize. So an example is when you or I go on vacation in Europe, and we go up to a trash can, and there's like six bins, and you pause and you look for a local, and maybe you're like, "Where does my water bottle go? Because your waste stream is so different than how we handle it in the U.S. I know that there is going to be huge improvements in waste sorting. AI is actually part of how Rumpke is improving their ability to sort recyclable materials. Know that this is a milk jug and that's a water bottle, and we need to send them to different places. And I have a sneaking suspicion that is going to be more common practice, and I hope kind of on site. So maybe we're handing our trash to a robot who knows, you know, the sorting streams, and it's putting it in the right bin for us because that's tough. You know, you go to an unfamiliar place, you want to do the right thing, but if their rules are different than your rules, we can use technology to make that so much simpler in the future. I also hope and am pretty sure that we're going to be seeing some more solar on campus in the future, and so there will be more resilience and grid independence. You know, if there's a power outage in 2060 on campus, we will be supplying a lot of our power through on-site generation. It makes us more prepared for emergencies, and it means that we have a lot more control over the cost of energy. If we've learned anything about the cost of energy recently, it's that it goes up, and if you are producing it yourself, you're protected from a lot of that market volatility.

President Greg Crawford
And so, what is a university's responsibility to future generations of students who aren't even here yet? So, how do you think about that?

Olivia Herron
I love daydreaming about our future Miamians and what their lives will be like in our more sustainable future. That I really believe is, you know, going to come to fruition. And I talk with my students and anyone who's trying to learn about sustainability that every 10th of a degree of warming that we can prevent is worthwhile. Just because we're surpassing 1.5 C, it's not game over. 1.6 is better than 1.7, or 2.1 degrees of warming is less scary than 2.3. So everyone has their part to play in their own industry, in their own field. But any amount that we can prevent climate pollution, it is to our own advantage and to the advantage of future generations. And a little Miami example to illustrate that: the last year that we burned coal on campus was our first year around here. 2016 is the last year that we burned coal, and when we discontinued that practice, the air quality in Oxford improved for everybody. And there's some new health research that is actually indicating kids have higher IQs and bigger lung capacity when they grow up around less air pollution. So when we stopped burning coal, we made all the kids in Oxford smarter, and it's going to take that enhanced brain power for us to solve whatever future problems the world may have. But I feel like we're on the right track.

President Greg Crawford
Great. Well, last question for you today. We're grateful for your time being on the podcast, but why don't we end with? I'll let you brag a little bit about Miami metrics or our success, our achievements. I know they're pretty extraordinary, but I'll let you speak about them.

Olivia Herron
I love to get to rattle off some of our biggest accomplishments. So just this year, Miami was awarded Second Nature's Climate Luminary Honor for decarbonization. So the group that oversees higher ed sustainability said that we were this year's most impressive leader in decarbonizing college campuses, and it was so cool to get to go to their conference, receive that award on behalf of the university. And share with people at other schools, you know, what we've been able to accomplish. Miami has reduced our energy-based emissions 50% since 2008, and that is remarkable. In 2008, that would have included coal, natural gas, electricity. Today, we're not burning coal anymore, but we're using 50% less energy to power our campus, and not only is the power you don't use the greenest power on Earth, it's also the cheapest. So if you can reduce your demand for energy, that is really where you're going to pay dividends in your sustainability work. And as we've all seen, we've also grown a lot in that same time. We've added about 2.5 million square feet of building space. So if you're looking at how much climate pollution there is per square foot of campus, it's down 63% from 2008. It has through a lot of nitty gritty engineering tuning boilers, things that happen behind the scenes. I joke that when Miami is at its best for sustainability, our students don't even feel the difference. It's 68 degrees in their dorm when they want it to be. They don't know that it's geothermal cold water that was chilled using the power of the sun collected through solar panels. They are in some super high tech, very well engineered facilities, but they don't have to think about it. The lights come on, the air conditioning works. So some of our biggest accomplishments just feel like really comfortable, cool residence halls where they get to meet their best friends, where they get to start their own careers. We're kind of sometimes in the background, which can be its own challenge. But there's been a lot of good work. We also have 3336 solar panels out at the Mitchell Park, and I know that number is only going to continue to grow into the future for our campus. But Miami has really been a leader since you know 1969 when we founded the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, which predates the federal EPA. Miamians were thinking about preserving the Earth for future generations long before other institutions, and when you look at our successes, it's because you know we're building on the successes of all the amazing folks who've come before us.

President Greg Crawford
Well, that's great. I'm going to give you one more question here because you know it's something that's certainly you wouldn't hear a lot about this, but you know it's not as fun as talking about semiconductors and solar panels, or...

Olivia Herron
I'm glad you also think...

President Greg Crawford
...or the heat transfer and geothermal, right? But we've done a lot of work from taking steam to hot water. Just give us a little bit of that. I know it's not as as fun of a technology, but it does save a lot. 

Olivia Herron
It saves so much money, and students do actually get really into it when they get to go see the facility. When I take students to tour our geothermal plant, I like to be the last one following them up the steps in the geothermal plant, and the most common feedback I hear was that tour was way cooler than I thought it was going to be, so once you know, you can geek out like we do about steam and heating hot water. But steam is just a very high temperature. You have to boil water to produce steam, so you know that it's going to be energy intensive. It is difficult to keep it in a gaseous form moving through our five miles of utility tunnels. The steam plant is over by Peabody Hall, but it heats Millet, so that energy is traveling really far, and you have a lot of losses in a steam-based system. If you've ever heard that Miami had heated sidewalks, we didn't do that on purpose. That was the losses from our inefficient steam system accidentally heating up the sidewalks on its way to heat the buildings. And compared to boiling water, gaseous steam heating hot water only runs at 130 degrees Fahrenheit. So just thinking about the difference in temperature, you're already saving tons of energy, and our new process is very insulated. There are so many technology improvements all along the way that are making heating hot water a more sustainable choice than geothermal, and then it also opened the door for chilled water. So if you're already sending hot water to a building, you have the opportunity to air condition it with cold water. So that has improved a lot of our facilities, made them more comfortable for our students, makes move-in way more comfortable for their parents. I have never heard the end from my dad about. Me over packing for freshman move-in and having to carry those step, you know, boxes to the third floor of Scott Hall before it was air conditioned. It was a sweaty move-in, and so students are having a much more comfortable experience because of our transition to heating hot water and geothermal chilled water, and we've saved almost 130 million dollars since 2008 because of those transitions. So it's better for students, it's better for the budget, and it's better for the earth.

President Greg Crawford
But you just gave away our secret about these heated sidewalks. Now everybody knows the real story.

Olivia Herron
I know. Sorry, guys. It really was something we considered when we were going geothermal. We said we're going to have to buy more salt.

President Greg Crawford
Yes. Well, it's great to have you here today, Olivia. Congratulations on all your success. We're so happy you came back to Miami and came back to your alma mater. And this topic is, of course, very close to all of our hearts here at the university, so thank you so much for sharing your perspective and all your passion today, and good luck into the future.

Olivia Herron
Thank you very much.

President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of "In Such a Place" from Miami University. Stay tuned for more great episodes with more great guests wherever podcasts are found.