Q&A: A Man on a Mission

CSU Dominiguez Hill’s Kenny Seeton takes a “no excuses” approach to eliminating carbon emissions on campus.

On the California State University, Dominguez Hills campus, they call Kenny Seeton, the Director of Central Plant Operations, “Kenergy,” reflecting his infectious personal style and passion for reducing the university’s carbon footprint. Cobbling together pilot programs, grants and partner deals, he led a campus-wide retrofit that has reduced greenhouse gas on campus by 71% since 2018, and completed the largest heat pump project on the West Coast, which reduced gas usage in the university’s central plant by 96%. He is on a mission to make the campus net zero on scope one and two emissions before he retires.

How are you funding your initiatives?

Solar is easy because you can do it with a PPA, a Power Purchase Agreement, so no money down. Sign a contract. I can get the two megawatts put in for 12 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour, and I’m paying 27 cents to a utility company now. So, that’s a steal. The campus saves a quarter of a million dollars
a year and I’m greener for it.

I’ve done really well at creating a reputation of being able to get things done, so that if they give me money, I make good use of it. I’ve been here since 2011 and I’ve never asked the VP for money to do my projects. In 2018 we were invited into a pilot project with Southern California Edison called the Clean Energy Optimization Pilot. It was seven universities from the UC and CSU systems. I got $3.3 million a year for four years to do energy-efficiency projects, and I was really good about keeping the money for energy-efficiency projects.

What’s the key to reaching your goal?

More solar and more batteries. You need more solar so that you can run everything, but then you need enough storage to carry things through the nighttime... Building efficiency is huge. We have to get better at designing for building efficiency. I go through and do building efficiency at a granular level, like lighting controls. We need to run buildings correctly and implement better sequence of operations so that when I leave, it continues to run like it should. And you need to build a team that is as passionate as you are about this stuff.

What would you like to see from the design community?

I’d like the mechanical engineers to be in charge instead of the architects. They need to have more say in things because they get it. They have the ability to say, “Look, it’s going to be really hard for them to take out that 24-inch filter because you only left them 12 inches of space.” Mechanical engineers need to be made more a part of the process.

What do you find effective in getting projects to the finish line?

I can’t fix all the problems of the world, but I have made sure that I’m invited to the meetings now. It takes a champion. It really does. And too many of us choose to not have time to be the champion. If you’re not there at the conversation then you can’t blame anybody but yourself.

Our mindset has to change. We can’t be customers. We have to be partners. If you’re a customer, then you go to the auto dealership and you look at a car and you pick out the car and you buy it and that’s what you get. If you’re a partner, then you go to the auto builder and say “Hey, I want this and this and this, and what if we did this?” You can’t just sit back and take whatever they give you. If you’re not partners in this conversation, then you’re going to get what you get.

What advice would you give your peers trying to do better?

Don’t be afraid to shift gears. If I do a project and it doesn’t work out, I have no problem ripping it out and doing it right two years later. That’s going to be painful. That’s all right. It’s going to be painful once, and now we’ve learned.

Anything else?

We need to design to the 80%, not the 20%. What I mean by that is that we get these buildings, and nobody wants any complaints, so they set things up for 100% of people, because otherwise 20% are going to have problems. Every time we do that, we’re wasting energy in 80% of the spaces.

We need to design to the 80% and customize to the 20%. That run in sequence of operation, controls, mechanical, all that stuff. Whatever we have to do. And we need to stop sending energy — lighting, cooling, heating — to places that don’t have people. We need to get better at doing that. I always like to say, if better is possible, good is not enough.