$15,000 Per Building: Carnegie Mellon's HVAC Savings with CampusIQ

Aaron Benz: All right. Welcome to another Bow Tie Tuesday. It is my pleasure to be joined with Ian Gray from Carnegie Mellon, who is doing some really interesting work — especially applying different types of data to their buildings to actually help save real energy dollars, things that affect your OpEx budget that, from our perspective, are the low-hanging fruit you can go capture. So we are here to see what CMU is doing, how they got there, and a little of the backstory from what I think is a super cool background: Carnegie Mellon was the first university to have enterprise Wi-Fi across their campus, and now they are using some of that Wi-Fi data to actually save energy costs and affect lots of other things across campus. So Ian, my pleasure — welcome to Bow Tie Tuesday.

Ian Gray: Hey, thanks Aaron. Pleasure to be here.

Aaron Benz: Awesome. So you are a retro commissioning manager. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what your main job at CMU is, where you focus, and a little bit about CMU itself for people who are less familiar with where you are located and your size.

Ian Gray: Of course. Carnegie Mellon is in Pittsburgh — we are neighbors with the University of Pittsburgh, or Pitt. You have probably all heard of that school. CMU is really well known for our computer science school, but we have a very diverse student body because we also have a really great fine arts and drama program. So we produce a lot of artists and actors as well as our nerdy computer science and engineering students. I am a retro commissioning manager. You may have heard of a commissioning manager — kind of the bridge between the construction team and the owner-operators. The "retro" means I am looking at existing buildings. We have buildings that are 100-plus years old. They have obviously changed a lot, and the occupants' activities in those buildings have changed a lot over those years. So they need a tune-up, a checkup from a commissioning manager like me, to make sure they are first and foremost serving the needs of the occupants — which is education and research — and then doing that in an energy-efficient way.

Aaron Benz: I think you said something there. Are you telling me that the schedules people set 20 years ago are not necessarily the most optimized version to run your buildings today?

Ian Gray: Yeah. 20 years ago would have been the beginning of digital building automation systems, and scheduling was probably not a big thought back then. So historically we have run our buildings with occupied and unoccupied schedules in a very conservative way, because we want to make sure people are comfortable when they are coming in early in the morning and staying late at night. But with CampusIQ, we are able to really tighten those building schedules down — to see when people are actually using these facilities. Sometimes it does not match up with what we had assumed, and we find we can claw back a few hours a day at these buildings, putting them in unoccupied mode — and even more on the weekends. Obviously there is a big change on weekends with our academic buildings.

Aaron Benz: Tell us a little bit about that. You have whatever schedule was set up, and you are trying to use this data to see when people are actually in the building. How many buildings are you currently applying this to? And where are you finding the edges, the wins? How are you measuring it — is it hours at different set points, is it dollars? Maybe take us through that process.

Ian Gray: Of course. So we have CampusIQ. Our pilot was sold on HVAC savings, and we have it at five buildings right now. A few of those buildings are newer, so we have greater control over the mechanical systems — the air handlers, the little terminal units that serve each individual zone. With that fine control: on average, a building that is occupied might be using around 200 kilowatts of electricity. When it is unoccupied, you can basically cut that in half. So that is 100 kilowatts every hour that you get back — 100 kilowatt hours per hour — while it is in unoccupied mode. For us, we have really cheap electricity out here in Western PA. That is about ten dollars an hour for one building for one hour of unoccupied time. Let's say we get back four hours a day — over 30 days a month, that is about $1,200 a month on one building. Over the course of a year, you are talking $15,000 for one building, just from clawing back a few hours per day of unoccupied time. And that is on Western PA's cheap electricity rates. If you are on the East Coast, where electricity rates are three times that, you could be saving $50,000-plus per average-sized academic building.

Aaron Benz: So are you seeing where maybe the building was in occupied mode too early or too late, and how do you match that up against when people are really here? That is basically the low-hanging fruit you are able to capture?

Ian Gray: Absolutely. They were going occupied too early. We were assuming people were coming in and using the space earlier than they actually were. We are able to look over the course of a semester at what the typical concurrent users are for each hour, and set a threshold: at this point, we should say the building is occupied. You are always going to have some people in a building — some people stay through the night babysitting a lab experiment, and you have custodial staff as well. But you do not need the entire building to be occupied to serve the needs of those people.

Aaron Benz: That makes sense. Tell me about what is next for you — what you have been able to apply, and where it goes from here. What is the next step that is exciting to you?

Ian Gray: We would love to get real-time integration with our building automation system, so we can feed the occupancy data directly into the systems that control our lighting, water systems, and HVAC. But there is a huge use for this data outside of facilities. When we think about the Office of the Registrar — how efficiently are they scheduling their classes compared to classrooms on campus that are scheduled by departments? This is something CampusIQ built a custom filter for us, so we could look at how Registrar- versus department-controlled classrooms were performing. Our Institutional Effectiveness and Planning group and our Student Affairs group are really interested in the carrying capacity of the university — how many people can we admit into each incoming class, given our bottlenecks or constraints on dining facilities or recreation facilities? It is a really important piece: not just looking at what these spaces look like when you send someone down to look, but seeing peak usage over an entire semester, which can inform decisions to increase carrying capacity — and that has a huge impact on the bottom line of the university.

Aaron Benz: That is awesome. It is so cool to see you applying it and getting those first easy savings. I try to tell everybody: wherever the fast wins are, fast wins fund the future. So go get those wins. It is awesome to hear what CMU and your team are doing. I think there is a bigger need everywhere for universities to have the role you fill — the retro commissioning manager — or just the idea that our space is always changing. People's needs are changing. Does it not make sense that we need to constantly rethink how our buildings are working, and what can lift and shift or move, in order to serve our constituents and also do things like save energy costs? If nobody is thinking about it, there is a gap. So, super cool. Ian, thank you so much for being on Bow Tie Tuesday. It is great talking to you, and I look forward to talking with you in the future about what happened next at CMU.

Ian Gray: Thank you, Aaron. It has been a pleasure.