Don’t Let Energy Costs Devour Your Budget

What happens when experts start looking systematically for ways to trim energy use on a 302-acre campus with 218 buildings in downtown Philadelphia? They find surprises — and potential savings — in attics and basements, in ductwork and utility tunnels, in construction documents and daily schedules, in classrooms and labs.

“We saw one air handler where there were side-by-side fans and one was wired backwards, so one was blowing air and one was sucking it in,” says John Zurn, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Century Bond Program, which has paid for numerous facilities upgrades. “So then the fans downstream were running overtime to try to make up for it.”

It was only one set of fans, Mr. Zurn says. So it didn’t create a big bump in the university’s electricity bills. “But things like that happen,” he says, especially on a campus with buildings of all ages and descriptions, including some for which accurate plans don’t exist and with mechanical spaces so jam-packed that even laser scans can’t determine which pipes head where.

Your Budget Is Leaking Millions of Dollars

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.

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The searches also turned up costlier problems, says Benedict Suplick, Penn’s director of engineering and energy planning. For example, some buildings’ systems were set to operate as if the spaces were occupied around the clock when in fact they were not. “So we take a look at the occupancy schedule and then we ramp down the equipment in the off hours,” he says. “And we’re looking at the lighting controls. Do they make sense based on the programming of the building? It’s a good energy saving to be able to turn the lights off automatically.”

The experts — including contractors hired by the university — also found plenty of dated practices and old equipment. For safety’s sake, Penn’s research labs used to get about 15 complete air changes every hour, on the tried-and-true principle that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” But all that fresh air had to be heated or cooled, and often dehumidified as well. Cutting back to about six changes, says Mr. Suplick, is possible today because modern sensors can quickly detect contaminants and signal the air-handling system to speed up if necessary.

The rest of the time, heating and cooling so much less air brings big savings — especially when combined with new heat-recovery systems that capture the warmth or chill of exhaust air and use it to treat the incoming flow. Additional economies have resulted from replacing old-style fume hoods, which pulled in air at a constant rate of 100 cubic feet per minute, with variable-speed models that can sense when someone is working and cycle up accordingly.

Penn is certainly not the only big university to take a hard look at its facilities and practices and find that it’s been squandering energy. But in 2007 its president, Amy Gutmann, was the first in the Ivy League to sign the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. The university’s experience since offers a good illustration of how colleges can make their buildings more efficient at the same time that students and faculty members are being encouraged to change their own behavior to cut back on energy waste.

Anne Papageorge, vice president for facilities and real-estate services since 2006, says she was asked at her first Board of Trustees meeting what Penn was doing to become environmentally sustainable. Soon she was reading a report from the university’s Center for Environmental Building & Design that said Penn could reduce energy demand significantly, saving $9 million, with a series of quick-payback “recommissioning” projects — hiring those building-engineering experts to audit lighting, heating, and air-conditioning systems. They would tune up what could be tuned and suggest changes where they would save money.

“That caught my eye, and it caught my boss’s eye,” says Ms. Papageorge. “We’re now up to 83 building audits that have been completed, and 231 million kBTUs of energy savings have been achieved.” Audits of 18 more buildings are underway this year, and about the same number are planned for future years. (“Commissioning” is fine-tuning a brand-new building’s systems; “recommissioning” does a tuneup on an older structure.)

“Our utility bill used to be $60 million a year,” says Ms. Papageorge. “If you can save 5 percent, that’s real money — that’s $3 million.”

Over the years since she read that first report, Penn’s energy-saving efforts have grown in number and ambition. Some of the projects have been paid for directly out of the facilities budget, while others have been split with the schools that have benefited from them. (At Penn, as at many other large universities, some of the larger schools are fund-raising powerhouses.)

Another big boost has come from the 2012 Century Bond program, in which Penn floated $300 million worth of 100-year bonds with a yield of 4.67 percent, at the same time investing $3 million that will be used to pay off the debt in 2112. About $200 million was set aside for deferred-maintenance and energy-efficiency projects, while the rest went for other Penn priorities.

“We did a feasibility study and identified nine HVAC replacement projects in lab buildings, which were our highest consumers, and 45 lighting projects,” says Ms. Papageorge. “For the lighting projects, we anticipate a 50- to 75-percent energy reduction, and then a 20- to 65-percent reduction for the HVAC projects.” More HVAC projects have since been added to the initial nine.

Ms. Papageorge also says that early in her time at the university, she realized that Penn had been regularly eliminating sustainability components from construction projects during what architects and builders call the “value engineering” phase — a polite term for cost cutting. In many cases, though, such cuts were penny-wise and pound-foolish.

“People didn’t understand the life cycle,” she says. “We’re in it for the long haul. We can make investments that in a typical real-estate development you might not do because you’re looking for a short payback.” A decade later, Penn has 20 buildings that have met LEED standards for energy and sustainability, she says, and the university has become “a community that really understands and appreciates” sustainability.

Still, the university has been reminded over and over that the devil is in the details. One summer the facilities team increased the thermostat settings in some buildings, expecting to reduce demand on the campus chilled-water network that enables air-conditioning. But because humid air has to be cooled into the 50s before the moisture can be removed, what actually happened was that chilled-water demand stayed where it had been and steam use went up, because HVAC systems were using steam to heat the dehumidified air to the higher temperature. (The sweet spot, in summer, is a situation in which the warmth of a building’s lights, computers, and occupants balances the cooling needed to dehumidify the air.)

Some of the university’s energy projects might seem counterintuitive to the layperson. For instance, a recent chiller-plant expansion cost $81.6 million and added two steam-powered chillers to the cold-water network. That brought the university to a total of eight chillers, each with a 5,000-ton capacity, says Mr. Suplick. So how can an expansion save money and energy?

“Six are electric, and two are steam-driven. When we peak on campus, we need a little over 30,000 tons of cooling capacity, so I need to run six chillers. If I run four electric and two steam on those peak days, it’s a help to the power grid that we’re not drawing more electricity from it.” Instead, the new chillers can take advantage of cheap steam that the local utility has left over from generating electricity to meet that high demand.

Unlike some universities, Penn does not generate its own power, although it studied the possibility when it most recently renegotiated its utility contract. It does, however, tailor its electric use to the way the utility does its billing, Ms. Papageorge says.

Penn’s electric rate for the entire year is based on how much power it uses on its five highest-consumption days, she says, so the facilities team works hard to manage campus electricity demand on the hottest afternoons. One little-known trick relies on a set of big tanks in which the university makes ice at night, when the cost of running the chillers is low. The ice can then be melted to help keep the chilled-water lines cold in the afternoon, when utility costs soar.

And thanks to a network of nearly 300,000 sensors and control points that report to a control room in the facilities office, the on-duty manager can cycle off some air handlers for half an hour at a time, or let temperatures in the chilled-water loop creep up a little, when demand is rising too fast.

Those sensors and control points are the keys to the university’s next step in energy management, which will take place as soon as Penn finishes a new digital backbone to replace the 25-year-old communications network linking the control room to the rest of the campus.

“We have all this data coming in,” says Mr. Suplick. “How do you manage that? How do you figure out what the problem areas are?” The answer will be a new building-automation software package that will automatically search the flood of data for issues.

“If you have a set point on a piece of equipment and things start to wander, it will tell you,” Mr. Suplick says. “It can even give you a list of the top things that you should go fix. And it can tell you how much not fixing it is costing you.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.