Reducing Costs And Increasing Comfort
It's no spring break for David Norvell, energy manager for the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Over the past year, Norvell has dealt with fixed improvement budgets, rising fuel costs, sensitive customers, and ruthless weather conditions. Yet, he still gets enthusiastic when he discovers innovative energy saving strategies. He even shares his innovations for free!
By Heidi Schwartz
What is your background?
I've worked for the university for three years. In my position here, I manage the energy consumption for approximately five million square feet of space.
Before that, I worked for 10 years in the industrial controls and building automation markets, where I supported the facility management profession. I have a very good understanding of my suppliers and their products.
What project best defines the green philosophy your organization wishes to convey?
Our university is focused on reducing cost, which in turn, reduces the tax burden on Floridians. We're a public university, so we're always trying to be wise stewards with those tax dollars. As residents of this state, we have to pay those taxes too!
We reduce our consumption of natural resources when we reduce energy costs, but we're also charged with maintaining the comfort of students and faculty. I feel very strongly that these two things can be done at the same time. In fact, I feel you can even increase comfort.
How does your work put forth those ideals?
We conducted a test of an occupancy based thermostat (SensorStat DDC by Onity). When someone enters an empty room, the thermostat sees the person enter and turns on the equipment. When that person leaves, the sensor verifies that no one is in the room and revises the room's set point.
The sensor is already popular in hotels, so we thought it would be a good candidate for our residence halls, which is where we're testing it.
What is the anticipated ROI for this project?
I can report a verified payback period of 10 months. We've already passed that goal. It's not an estimate; it's a solid number for that product at our dorms with our students. Of course, payback will depend on particular heat load and physical latitude, because that has an impact on how much air conditioning will be used. We have our a/c on practically year round.
Who drove the investigation of this technology?
Image by Onity
I did. First I put the new thermostat in one room and used real time energy monitoring to compare usage in a room with an old mercury thermostat. I plotted those energy savings for a year, in which time, we approached a 60% savings rate--all without a single complaint from the residents.
After the initial test, I installed the system into additional rooms. It will be tested even more. In fact, I'm working on the funding for widespread implementation. The resident population is sold on the idea, but we just haven't come up with the funding yet.
I've never been able to do anything in the residence halls before, and that's a major percentage of the square footage on campus. It's a tremendous opportunity for savings. Up until now, I've concentrated my efforts on the big buildings, the classrooms, and the labs, but I wanted to get in and see if anything could be done in the residence halls.
Our funds are allocated on a fixed dollar per square foot basis in the state of Florida, which is the same as any other public university in the state. With that fixed amount, we've seen significant hikes in the price of energy this year. I have to look for all possible ways to save.
At the same time that's happening, the campus is aging. That aging requires more maintenance of the equipment and more capital renewal. So we need to have money freed up for that purpose.
What was the reaction of upper management to the decision to investigate this technology?
Overall, upper management has been very supportive, although everything is confined by funding limitations--particularly this year. You see, we've had a very hard time with hurricanes; three directly hit our campus last year. We're still adding up the millions of dollars of damage that we sustained, and we're still doing repairs. That has been the focus.
Have you applied for--or achieved--LEED certification from the USGBC for this project?
I am looking at LEED certification. In fact, I'm hoping to become certified myself. It's a goal for our university, but it's not a really high priority right now. We're mainly concerned with the daily efforts to reduce consumption.
What's your opinion of the LEED process?
From my perspective, the language is a bit offputting. I've experienced that myself, and I'm an engineer. It may be easy for design engineers to understand, but not facility engineers.
What has been the reaction to results of the project inside your organization?
We did not alert the students of this experiment, and the reaction has been good. Management is pleased with the energy savings. The residents have not reported any inconveniences, so there have been no complaints. We're still not publicizing it heavily, so I don't think many students are even aware of what's going on.
What did you personally learn from this project?
More aggressive controls can be applied to spaces--even spaces where sensitive residents are housed. Before we started the pilot, I was told over and over again that the students would not allow us to do anything. They'd be complaining in no time, and it would get ugly. Meanwhile, I haven't had one complaint.
After the success of this test, I'm planning to push the envelope even more. I'll continue to look for opportunities and other products that aren't being applied to facilities.
Why should facility professionals seriously consider green solutions whenever the opportunity is present?
Because they're easy to accomplish. There are freebies just waiting to be grabbed. There's almost immediate payback on many things.
There's a myth that green solutions cost more, and that's just a very simplistic way to look at things. Facility managers need to evaluate each and every opportunity.
What other tools do you use to uncover the possibilities of unconventional energy savings for your organization?
I believe very strongly in monitoring and metering everything. I've developed my own open source metering system that we use here at the university. It's called OEIS (Open Energy Information Systems), and my Web site is www.energy.ucf.edu. It's a big project.
I decided to go this route, because the commercially available monitoring equipment was-and is-so expensive. It lengthens the payback period of everything.
So we developed our own system. Since it's all open source, it's available at no cost to be used at any facility.
What was the most professionally rewarding aspect of this project?
I've got a deal with my boss. If I'm able to verify any savings, I can recoup a portion of that money out of our utility budget to my own budget. Then I can apply those funds to my work on energy projects.
With this project alone, I've had real and verified savings that I've been able to put into an account. I'm going out and looking for the other low hanging fruit.
There's so much I want to do! I've only been here a few years, so it's early days. I want to complete the lighting retrofits and investigate the applications for variable frequency drives--they're big energy savers.
I want to advance my building automation efforts too. About 75% of our campus is set with building automation, but there's that last 25% I'd like to do.
I'm always looking for higher efficiency equipment. We just started our new high efficiency, 2,000 ton chiller. It will save us a lot of money; somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year over its 20 year life. We're excited!
For questions about this article, contact Norvell at dnorvell@mail.ucf.edu.
To share your "green solutions," send an e-mail to schwartz@groupc.com.
