Market: Education
Location: Newport News, VA
Challenge
Peninsula Catholic High School has been a client for a number of years now. As a private school, funding is always a concern as it is a balance between student impact expenditures and facility maintenance. They came to us with a concern about their utility spending and their aging HVAC Infrastructure.
Solution
We were able to create a solution that upgraded their major HVAC systems, including a new controls system, that was projected to yield a simple pack back of just under 5 years, on an investment of $250k. The project was completed and as part of our warranty commitment, we provided a year of remote BAS monitoring free of charge.
After the first year, we saw a problem emerging. The energy savings were falling short of the projection. Our investigation determined a number of avenues for operational improvement. Schedule changes, setpoint limits and allowing us to remotely administer the building operation were among our recommendations to increase performance.
The keys to success with this customer were:
- Open communication with the customer on expectations and performance.
- Creative solutions that resolved the customer’s pain.
- Use of an Energy Dashboard to raise visibility of performance and increase focus on impact actions.
- Active engagement through remote monitoring to both increase comfort and reduce energy spend.
A Closer Look
In the first year, Peninsula Catholic High School came close to the projected savings and captured $54,558 in energy costs.
In year two, ColonialWebb enhanced the existing HVAC maintenance contract and added a continuing commissioning process of “Remote Monitoring”. Working closely with Peninsula’s staff to fine tune and tighten up the schedules and remotely monitoring trends and issues, CW’s energy engineers made system adjustments to improve the savings.
As a result of the “Remote Monitoring” during year two, Peninsula Catholic’s savings jumped from $54,558 to $85,632 and up to $90,436 in year three. Overall, the Remote Monitoring improved the rate of savings by 56%.
At the beginning of the project Peninsula Catholic had an Energy Star rating of 11. Any building with an Energy Star rating of 75 or higher can be certified by Energy Star as an environmentally friendly building. Since ColonialWebb’s “energy cost reduction” implementation, just over three years ago, Peninsula Catholic High School not only has saved a total of $281,833 in energy costs, but the Energy Star score has quickly risen to 57.
Peninsula Catholic was well ahead of the original payback projection throughout the entire process and has completed their payback in just 3.8 years!