After creating an effective organization with strong technical skills, Riley’s next step was to establish reasonable comfort standards for all buildings on campus, ensuring technicians weren’t adjusting temperature within buildings on a customer’s whim. “For example, if a technician goes out on a call and our target setpoint is 75 F for cooling, plus or minus 1 degree, and it’s 75 F and the customer feels hot, the technician makes sure the humidity is not too high and there’s reasonable airflow,” Riley says. “Instead of just cranking down the thermostat or adjusting the air handler to put out colder air, we politely tell the customer the temperature is where it
should be. When you have more than 19 million square feet of conditioned space, our technicians cannot run around giving everyone whatever temperature they want. You would have inconsistency at best and chaos at worst.”
Texas A&M also has an active retro-commissioning program with its own distinct team, which also is managed by UES. The program focuses on areas of high consumption or buildings that have a number of comfort issues. “We may do a quick retrocommissioning in buildings with simpler systems and lower consumption, but the heavier-consuming spaces we get back to more frequently to keep them optimized,” Riley notes.
Energy Stewardship
Despite these first steps, Riley recognized his team hadn’t achieved full support from the campus population. “We realized our technicians were doing a great job in the field, but they didn’t have time to meet with customers and develop relationships to work with them on improving performance. Typically, the technicians needed to be off to the next job,” he says.
To close the gap, the UES team established an Energy Stewardship Program, or ESP, which consists of a supervisor and six full-time energy stewards, who were hired specifically to ensure customer needs are met while raising awareness about financial and environmental costs of wasted energy and water usage. The energy stewards develop relationships with building occupants to gain support for energy and water conservation, as well as recycling programs. “The stewards were hired understanding the ESP positions must pay for themselves through cost savings,” Riley says. “We will actually save two or three times the salaries paid to energy stewards.”
One area in which stewards place particular focus is HVAC scheduling. Riley explains: “We sometimes notice the HVAC system in a building is operating more hours than required, so the energy stewards have a conversation with the building occupants about shutting off the system during unoccupied times,” Riley explains. “Instead of building occupants feeling like we’re doing something to them, our goal is to gain their trust and create results together.”
Competition also is employed. For example, an annual residence hall competition pits students in different resident halls against one another to save energy and money and results in a prize for the hall that saves the most energy.
Metering and Measurement
Another major part of Texas A&M’s energy-efficiency program is utility metering and measurement—an area that Riley says is “sadly missing” on most campuses. “It’s amazing how accountants will measure budgets to the dollar, but universities spend millions of dollars on energy and often do not know where it’s going,” Riley states. “When campuses are metered at the building level, you know where the consumption is and you can start developing building profiles and strategies for improvement for every single building.”
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The International District Energy Association recently gave Texas A&M an Award of Excellence for district energy. http://www.districtenergyaward.org/awards/2013-2/