Presenting, Connecting, and Celebrating Success at the 2023 Green Schools Conference

In late February, Undaunted’s co-founders Jonathan Klein and Sara Ross met up in New Orleans to attend the 2023 Green Schools Conference. It was such a joy to be surrounded by so many leaders from across the country who are doing the work to advance green schools. We are so thankful to our hosts, the Green Schools National Network and the Center for Green Schools. What a gift to the community to create the space for us to gather in person.

We were thrilled to celebrate the U.S. Department of Education, CMTA, and This is Planet Ed for their contributions to the field along with all the other recipients of the 2023 Best of Green Schools Awards. 

Another highlight of the conference was having the opportunity to share some of our recent work to understand how the Inflation Reduction Act can catalyze school decarbonization. Sara  participated alongside Alex McDonough, a partner at Pioneer Public Affairs, and Scot Bearss, project leader for Net Zero at Nelnet Renewable Energy on a panel entitled: “How to Finance Campus Decarbonization”.

Alex set the stage by reviewing the various opportunities in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) that are available to schools. There were lots of questions about some of the finer details. In many cases, we are still awaiting additional guidance from the US Treasury Department. The big picture is that schools have a rarely seen opportunity to leverage federal funds to improve their facilities.

Sara presented new work with RMI entitled: “HVAC Choices for Student Health and Learning”, which lays out the benefits of moving to modern HVAC systems.

This set up the opportunity to present a case study, using current real-world data, of the cost savings for schools that use the new Investment Tax Credit (from the IRA) to install ground-source heat pumps. The big take-away was that where they are viable, ground-source heat pumps are likely to be the lowest first-cost HVAC option for schools that are building new schools or taking on a major renovation.

This is big news! Undaunted will be doing more work in 2023 to help get the word out to those involved in school construction and modernization about this new cost landscape. This webinar and our new one-pagers (here and here) can help champions for this work start the conversation in their communities. 

Scot closed with how new business models are emerging to provide schools with “net-zero as a service”, an approach that can minimize or eliminate upfront costs for schools. Afterall, even with the Inflation Reduction Act defraying the costs substantially, in almost all cases local funding is still required to do this work. With so many schools facing tight budgets and the need to improve facilities to safeguard child health and learning opportunities so dire, these contracting methods are worth exploring. 

Check out the full presentation below and let us know if you have questions about the work. We’re always interested to hear from districts that are using the Inflation Reduction Act to catalyze improvements to school facilities that advance healthy, climate-resilient, decarbonized schools.