A step forward on climate goals, university says
Seth Daniel photos
Congressman Stephen Lynch and UMass Boston officials on Monday this week announced $1 million in federal funding that will help restore the 50-year-old saltwater pump station that provides cooling to the campus using water from Savin Hill Bay – and with equipment upgrades, might also be able to heat the campus.
Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco joined Lynch, City Councillor John FitzGerald, and doctoral student Kayla Bradley to make the funding announcement in front of the Fox Point facility.
“We fought for this funding to helping UMass Boston rehabilitate its saltwater pump house cooling system,” said Lynch. “This building has been quietly doing an enormous job for over 50 years. It actually draws in cold water from Savin Hill Bay to provide cooling for half of this campus, and eventually it will provide heat for half of the campus.
“It is about as smart and as green a system as you’re going to find, and it was ahead of its time when it was built 50 years ago.”
Officials noted that corrosion over those 50 years has made repairs essential, and they hope to phase out the station’s four gas-fired heating boilers and use new electric-powered equipment to recycle hot water that would heat some of the buildings as well.
That possibility will be tracked as the project advances, but, at the very least, the new equipment will help the University accelerate toward its climate decarbonization goals.
Congressman Stephen Lynch, Councillor John FitzGerald, and UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco listened as a UMass official broke down the project that will rehabilitate and expand the university’s ground-breaking saltwater heating and cooling system.
“These things will help our university advance its goal of 95 percent reductions in carbon emissions by 2050 and an 82 percent reduction by 2030,” said Suárez-Orozco. “The rehabilitation of the salt water pump is part of a broader decarbonization project focused on our physical plant that will hopefully replace our gas boilers with electric heat shifters and help us meet our climate goals well before 2050.”
He also said the city of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts continue to be the “gold standard for climate resiliency planning” with investments in projects like this.
Bradley, who got her undergraduate degree at UMass Boston and is now pursuing a doctorate in environmental science, said she has passed by the saltwater pump plant for years without knowing the environmental benefits it has provided for decades in using “nature-based solutions” to provide heating and cooling. She praised the new funding and how it will advance the use of those nature-based solutions.
“We need to get our campus to Net Zero as soon as possible, given the record-setting heatwaves we experienced this summer,” she said. “There is no more time to waste as we get our university to shift to clean energy with great haste.”
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