District Energy and Institutional Facilities:

District energy and institutional facilities have an energy and utilities objective of reducing the cost of providing utilities to its campuses and minimizing energy used within their facilities. Facilities, such as, university research centers and medical facilities need reliable and high quality power. These facilities also tend to be at the forefront of environmental compliance. Energy cost reductions are achieved by efficiently operating energy consuming equipment, recovering waste heat as useful energy, selecting the optimum mix of utilities equipment; better predicting energy commodity requirements and negotiating more favorable supply contracts. Excess power may also be sold to the local grid.

Operational and Strategic Issues:

Challenges: high energy costs; volatile energy prices; complex utility systems that are constantly changing; fragmented/inaccurate information; equipment and systems inefficiencies; poor return on capital; loss of experience when people retire.

Solution: monitor operations and financial performance; bring information together in an actionable form; improve efficiencies and overall site optimization; provide new insights on operations and reduce instrumentation errors; take energy contracts and prices into consideration; monitor and optimize emissions.

Strategic asset planning: identify and evaluate capital projects or operating improvements that reduce energy and utilities costs and consumption.