Energia has a long history acting as the advisor and advocate for school districts as they implement complex energy-savings initiatives, energy retrofits and EPC programs.
Often, when Energia has managed an EPC for a school district, its representatives find themselves revisiting and repairing some of the “sins of the past.” For example, at one school building, the HVAC system had been upgraded; however, the technicians took a shortcut and located the thermostats inside the wall registers. This resulted in heating and cooling systems fighting each other and operating simultaneously—alternatively heating and cooling the hallways and classrooms. This was a relatively inexpensive fix under an EPC to relocate the existing hardware and reprogram the building environmental systems to operate correctly. The changes more than paid for themselves, saving thousands in energy savings over the course of a single year.
Long Island School District Gets a Makeover
The Commack Union Free School District is a public-school system located in Suffolk County, N.Y., on Long Island. The school district serves approximately 6,000 students from a number of communities, including Commack, Dix Hills, Smithtown and East Northport. The district engaged Energia in 2018 to begin exploring ways an EPC could help it achieve its energy-efficiency and capital-improvement goals.
The district’s buildings needed many of the typical upgrades facing schools across the nation. Some of the challenges facing the district were:
- Older roofs in need of replacement
- Older boilers in need of replacement
- Outdated, expensive fluorescent and incandescent lighting
- Older pneumatic temperature control systems
In addition, the district managers wanted to explore two power-generation opportunities:
- Co-generation systems
- Solar PV systems
To accomplish Commack Union Free School District’s goals, Energia selected Johnson Controls as the ESCO contractor and oversaw the upgrades and installation of all the new environmental systems and controls, including:
- Occupancy sensors capable of detecting when rooms were in use and turning off lighting systems when unoccupied.
- Weatherization of entire buildings, including new roofing, to keep out moisture, heat and cold and maintain complete environmental control.
- Centralized temperature control systems and conversion to digital controls to allow facilities managers to manage all building environmental controls from a single location.
- Rooftop and carport solar, providing electrical generation of approximately 2.5 megawatts.
- Co-generation, or combined heat and power, plants were installed for increased efficiency and to recapture heat waste, putting it to use for building heating instead.
By the end of 2021, the retrofit had resulted in school district buildings that were cleaner and more environmentally improved learning environments. The retrofits and upgrades to the classrooms and community rooms, including gyms and auditoriums, provided a significant improvement to the learning environment with better heating, cooling and lighting.
The school district has been pleased with the results and the efforts of the Energia team in working with the district. “The Energia team members are independent experts in their field. This
is all that they do—Energy Performance Contracts,” says Laura Newman, assistant superintendent for Business and Operations, Commack Union Free School District. “It is highly technical; it has many moving parts; and they’re the ones who make sure that the district gets these types of capital projects done—done timely, done effectively and done efficiently so that there are utility savings that the district will save in the future.”
The entire project for Commack Union Free School District resulted in a $25 million annual savings over an 18-year term with $6.3 million in additional cash flow. Now that’s an A+ investment!
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Learn more about Energia and its work helping schools execute Energy Performance Contracts.