Campuswide email: Feb. 22, 2016

Dear Faculty, Staff and Students,

As you know, for more than a year, the university has been evaluating whether a possible partnership would help meet our ambitious sustainability goals. During this time, we have repeatedly asked a straightforward question: Have we seen enough potential to continue work on the Comprehensive Energy Management Project?

The answer today is yes. We see real opportunities, for instance, that a partnership could improve the energy efficiency of our entire campus by 25 percent in a decade or less.

This is why have decided to move forward into the third stage of our evaluation of the Comprehensive Energy Management Project.

We understand that some important questions have yet to be answered. The next step is to fully define the details of how a partnership might work. Throughout the project, and in particular, over the past three months, we have sought input from hundreds of students, faculty and staff so that we could ensure we are addressing the right questions.

We’ll spend the next few months working with our advisory groups and outside experts to develop the requirements — for conservation, service and reliability, financial terms and more — that a partner would need to meet. We’ll also dive deeper into an evaluation of the skills and capabilities of the teams that have proposed to do this work.

The end product of all this work will be a Request for Proposals. Ten teams provided responses in our idea-generating phase of this process, and we’ll be selecting a group of finalists with whom we can continue to communicate and who could then respond to a Request for Proposals.

This process will take some time, and we want to be crystal clear that the only decision at this point is to continue exploring this project. If the university decides to enter into a partnership, that decision would happen at the earliest in the fall after students and faculty have returned to campus.

We truly appreciate the diverse feedback we’ve received on this project. Those questions and answers are listed on the project website, osu.edu/energymanagement.

Thanks,

Bruce A. McPheron, PhD
Interim Executive Vice President and Provost

Geoffrey S. Chatas
Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Jay Kasey
Senior Vice President, Administration and Planning