Utility energy efficiency program managers are always faced with customers who want high-impact, low cost, quick-payback projects, and sometimes are confronted with stark examples of lost opportunities from this approach.
Michael Jordan (playfully introduced as "the Michael Jordan of energy efficiency") of Jones Lang LaSalle spoke at the Silicon Valley Leadership's Environmental Sustainability Symposium last week, and described how a project worked the way it should.
JLL is the lead behind the massive remodel of the Empire State Building in New York City, which will take 2.8 million square feet of Class C office space up to Class A standards, earning an expected LEED Gold Rating along the way.
What struck me in his comments, and in this great report from JLL, is that the project team took a holistic, iterative approach to defining a set of energy efficiency upgrades for this iconic building.
Starting with a theoretical minimum energy use for the site, and comparing that to actual use data over time, the team developed over eighty prospective measures and projects.
What I have seen over and over again in my quarter-century energy efficiency career is that a payback period-based list is generated, and everything above a certain criterion is then eliminated.
But what happened here is that the interactive nature of the projects was considered. For example, improvements to windows reduced the chiller load by 1600 tons, meaning the existing plant could be rehabilitated rather than replaced. (According to Michael, fully a third of the space in the building is currently not cooled.)
Compare this to a situation that hit me about four years ago. A facility manager of a downtown San Francisco office high rise asked for recommendations on chiller plant efficiency, as his existing units had reached the end of useful life.
Despite my recommendations, he said he was unable to secure funding for lighting retrofits and other improvements in the building that would have reduced the cooling load. So, there are a pair of very efficient chillers in that building, serving more load than they should need to. That's not an energy efficiency story for the ages.
Just to take it to another level, let's take a look at data centers. I have a great slide in my deck sourced from Peter Rumsey of Rumsey Engineers in Oakland, that shows how saving just one watt in a piece of IT equipment cascades throughout the power delivery and conditioning and cooling systems, resulting in multiples of energy reduction. And in new construction, where building a data center to serve 1 MW of IT load costs on the order of $5 million, saved watts add up.
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