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Mesa County Valley School District 51Grand Junction, CO
School buildings, many of which are older and inefficient, offer significant opportunities for saving energy and taxpayer dollars through energy efficiency retrofits. Through innovative financing mechanisms such as energy performance contracting, schools can pay for the upgrades out of existing facilities budgets with no added cost to the schools. Much of the work of upgrading schools is completed by local contractors, further stimulating the state's economy. Mesa County Valley School District 51 (MCVSD) in Colorado serves over 22,000 students in the Grand Valley, including the city of Grand Junction and surrounding communities. Funded primarily by state and local taxpayer dollars, MCVSD employs 2,980 people and operates 122 buildings on 43 school campuses. In 2007, MCVSD entered into a program of energy management that looks at all aspects of building energy usage and facility management. The school district partnered with the U.S. EPA ENERGY STAR Program, and made a fundamental commitment to protect the environment through continuous improvement of their facilities' energy performance. MCVSD Resource Conservation Manager Eric Anderson saw plenty of opportunity for energy savings, and began lobbying the school district to make some badly needed improvements. The most immediate maintenance need was replacing old and inefficient boilers in one school. At that time, Mesa County had been experiencing a recession for a few years. The school district had no capital reserves, and school facilities managers got by year after year on older, inefficient equipment. Many of the buildings had been built in the 1980's, with inefficient lighting and no exterior windows in the classrooms. Although the lighting in a few buildings had been upgraded in recent years, most still had old and inefficient fixtures and poor light quality. After a bond measure to fund the school facility upgrades failed in 2008, MCVSD looked into performance contracting, which was attractive because the funding comes out of the facilities operating budget over a period of many years, reducing or eliminating the need for upfront capital. They consulted with the Governor's Energy Office, and chose Trane, a large international energy service company (ESCO) with which the school district already had a working relationship, as primary contractor. Trane brought in Denver-based Financial Energy Management (FEM) to handle the lighting retrofit. The lighting opportunity turned out to be much bigger than originally guessed. The lighting retrofit involved 79 buildings, with a total of about 2.8 million square feet, and accounted for about two thirds of the total project cost. Improvements were made even to buildings that had seen lighting equipment upgrades as recently as four or five years ago. For example, many buildings had recently replaced old T-12 fluorescent tubes with more efficient T-8's, and had replaced metal halide lighting with fluorescents. In the past five years, however, further upgrades such as installing optical controls and electronic ballasts have become more cost-effective, increasing energy savings even more. In addition to installing more energy-efficient lamps and fixtures to save energy and money, FEM optimized the light levels for the kind of activity typical in each area, and used lamps with a higher quality light spectrum. The benefits of this lighting optimization include reduced eyestrain, improved reading and concentration, increased staff productivity, and in general a more pleasant environment for students, teachers and staff to learn and work. In some cases lighting optimization can result in slightly higher energy use, but these indoor environmental quality benefits are deemed to outweigh the energy costs. The project was started in 2009, and is expected to be completed in February 2010. Installers have been working nights, weekends and holidays so as not to disrupt students and teachers. In order to ensure that the project and the ongoing changes are understood at all levels, FEM held a series of "lighting kickoff meetings" involving a walk-through and information exchange with the principal, custodian and secretary (and sometimes others) at each school. The meetings helped these key staff members understand what was being done in each school and why; what impact it would have on students and staff; why it was a good deal economically and environmentally; and encouraged them to talk about it openly with their faculty, staff and students. Actual savings data will not be available until the year after completion, but the projections based on modeling are quite promising. The mechanical part of the project, which involved an HVAC upgrade at a single high school, is expected to cut the natural gas bill for that school by 50 percent. The lighting retrofit is expected to reduce demand by 1.29 MW and result in 3.2 million KWh per year electricity savings across the district. MCVSD is monitoring energy use as the project goes on, and is making its utility bills available for teachers and students to conduct research projects. The total project cost is approximately $4 million for lighting and mechanical combined ($2.6 million for lighting, and $1.4 million for HVAC), and is projected to save a total of $308,000 per year in energy and maintenance costs. With utility rebates, the payback time will be approximately 10 years for the mechanical and lighting retrofits combined. By using performance contracting, however, the school district did not need to provide any up-front financing. The contractors arrange the financing and will be paid from the energy and operational savings. The school district is guaranteed a minimum level of energy savings ($283,000 per year in this case) and a positive cash flow through this arrangement. Under this arrangement, the entire retrofit is paid for out of the school district's facilities operations budget, and no capital funds are needed. MCVSD opted for the utility's self-directed energy efficiency incentive program, which rewards the school district for total energy saved rather than setting rebate levels according to the installation of prescribed measures. The self-directed incentive process is more involved, but also more lucrative. For this project, utility rebates totaled approximately $800,000, roughly 20 percent of the total project cost. As a general practice, and especially on projects such as this one that are paid for by taxpayer dollars, FEM hires local contractors and uses Colorado-based distributors whenever possible. For this project, FEM and Trane together employed about sixteen people to work on this project: one Trane project manager, one FEM project manager, two site managers, and about twelve installers. Everyone working on the project lived in Colorado, and all materials were purchased from local distributors in the Grand Junction area. As FEM Project Manager Matt Kottenstette remarked, "There is plenty of talent in Colorado, and in this case the local distributors had even better prices than the bigger out-of-state distributors." Indeed, this large-scale institutional energy efficiency project creates a win/win/win scenario for everyone involved. Students, teachers and staff get a better working and learning environment; Colorado contractors, distributors and installers get lucrative business. The school district and Mesa County taxpayers save money without having to invest scarce financial resources in energy efficiency. The utilities make progress toward their mandated energy efficiency targets, and the Colorado environment benefits in a myriad of ways from reduced energy use, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. |
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© 2002-
Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, 2260 Baseline Rd. Suite 212, Boulder, CO 80302 phone: (303) 447-0078 fax: (303) 786-8054 email: info@swenergy.org |
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One of 79 MCVSD buildings receiving energy-efficient
lighting upgrades.
