In 2000, Cornell University made what has been perhaps American higher education’s boldest energy-saving move, opening a chilled-water plant that uses pipes reaching 250 feet into the depths of Cayuga Lake to provide cooling for the entire campus. The system saves at least 85 percent of the energy that would be needed to cool the campus conventionally.
Since then the administration has committed Cornell to becoming a carbon-neutral campus by 2035, and so facilities crews are working to find additional savings. “Someday we’re going to have to produce all our energy renewably,” says Robert R. Bland, associate vice president for energy and sustainability. “And that’s only 17 years away. It’s a lot easier to be able to save on demand than to produce all that energy renewably.”
They’re disappearing through vents, antiquated light bulbs, heaters, and chillers. Senior Writer Lawrence Biemiller explains how the University of Pennsylvania has been aggressively patching those leaks throughout 218 buildings on its 302-acre campus.
One way the university saves on demand is to keep a close eye on its buildings. Cornell hired 10 full-time employees in a “continuous commissioning” program that aims to inspect buildings every three to five years and make sure heating and cooling systems and lighting are working as efficiently as possible. The program, called Energy Conservation Control, costs about $1 million a year, says Ben Kuo, associate vice president for facilities management, but the university is getting a significant return on that investment.
What problems are found most often? “For humidity control, you cool air down, condense the water vapor, then you heat it back up,” says Mr. Bland. “If you’re not careful with that, you can do a lot of cooling and a lot of heating that are just working against each other.”
In addition, an automated system monitors campus buildings around the clock, Mr. Bland says. “We model the energy performance of the buildings and we weather-normalize the models, so we know how a building should be acting given the weather that month. If it’s not hitting that target, then we can go troubleshoot it.”
The university has also recently replaced about 150,000 four-foot incandescent bulbs with LEDs. “That decreased our energy demand by about 10 percent on campus,” Mr. Bland says. “Our campus daytime demand when all the lights were on was about 30 megawatts, and now it’s down to about 27.”
“Since 2000, the campus has grown about 22 percent, and we have kept our energy use flat,” he adds. “The reason is twofold. One is the buildings we’ve built are pretty high-performance and energy efficient. Two, we’ve done the continuous commissioning, not just for energy but also for building comfort and productivity and indoor-air quality. We were able to keep electricity, heat, and chilled water totally flat.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
