Rutgers Saves $1.5 Million in Energy Costs
NEWARK, N.J. — Newark Campus of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) saved $1,155,000 in its first two years of operation due to a program that involved continuous energy supervision of its chiller plant, boiler and cogeneration facility.
The RBHS facility is a district energy plant that provides utilities to RBHS and University Hospital of Newark. The central plant monitoring system at the facility was designed and implemented by New York-headquartered utiliVisor, an energy advisory company. utiliVisor implemented the program of continuous energy supervision for a 20,700-ton chilled water plant, 291,000-pounds-per-hour boiler plant and 10.5-MW cogeneration system, along with all ancillary equipment. The plant recently had been retrofitted with new energy-efficient equipment to provide utility service for the next 20 years of operation.
The utiliVisor program involved continuously commissioning the plant operations to maximize the payback of the retrofit for the university. The monitoring effort took a holistic view of energy performance, analyzing the operation of each piece of equipment required to generate and distribute chilled water, high temperature hot water and electric power to the campus. utiliVisor’s energy engineers were responsible for analyzing the energy data from the RBHS facility and recommending the most efficient operating strategy at all load conditions. The data analysis verified the energy models prepared for the retrofit, enabling the equipment to be fully optimized on an ongoing basis.
“With its retrofit project, Rutgers has committed considerable capital resources to install energy-efficient chillers and cogeneration equipment,” said Tim Angerame, director at utiliVisor, in a statement. “The continuous energy-monitoring program has helped ensure that the institution is getting the maximum potential energy savings from that investment.”
The results of the first year of monitoring at RBHS were presented by utiliVisor at the International District Energy Association Campus Conference in Atlanta in February 2014 in conjunction with Concord Engineering.
University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences has become the core of New Jersey’s health sciences system. With three campuses and a network of more than 200 affiliated health care and educational partners spanning the state, RBHS is one of the nation’s largest health sciences universities.