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Sept. 1, 2015 — When a complex central energy plant such as a chiller plant is operating at a sub-optimal level, it wastes energy and increases plant operation and maintenance costs. It may even interfere with the building occupants’ ability to achieve their core objectives — especially if the chiller plant serves a mission-critical facility, such as a medical center.
Understandably, owners and plant operations managers often turn first to the provider of their building management system (BMS) for an optimization solution. Unfortunately, the provider’s solution may be a proprietary operating platform that is not customized for the unique requirements of every chiller plant.
In many cases, the new operating platform simply adds an opaque layer — a “black box” — to a BMS that was already dysfunctional. The dysfunctionality may have developed because the BMS' operating algorithm was never fully customized for the plant or adjusted over time as necessary for chiller plant equipment upgrades or changes in operating trends.
One way to achieve significant energy savings without making a substantial capital investment — that is, instead of investing in a black box, which is believed to be a panacea for your operations problems — is to assess the plant’s performance with actual metering and a staff of specialized engineers interpreting the data and recommending enhanced operating strategies. utiliVisor, a web-based, independent continuous energy monitoring and advisory service, offers such assessments.
Using this strategy, a leading medical center learned that it could have avoided a $148,000 “black box” capital investment, as energy monitoring and oversight identified over $103,000 in total savings that could be gained from operational improvements. That includes more than $56,500 in potential savings that were not realized through operation of the new black box platform alone but could have been attained by reprogramming the existing control system.
For more information about utiliVisor, visit www.utilivisor.com. For an expanded version of this article, click here.
