Duke Facilities Management Department’s Utility and Engineering Services team is always considering ways to reduce the energy use on campus through investments in building and plant efficiency. Highlights from 2023-24 include:
Perkins Library Energy Optimization: Tom Young of Utility and Engineering Services worked with the conservation librarians at Duke Libraries to evaluate six large air handling units that serve this facility, and specifically maintain ideal temperature and humidity conditions for the people and materials that inhabit Perkins Library. After a substantial collaboration around the science of document preservation, the project team began identifying and implementing some automation and control engineering changes to the Perkins HVAC system that reduced heating energy requirements more than 20%, and cooling energy requirements over 5%. This resulted in more than $240,000 in annual energy cost avoidance for that facility, and an estimated reduction of 525 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
Duke Athletics facility automation optimization: Utility and Engineering Services collaborated with Duke Athletics to build a web and mobile device-based app that allows their Gameday Operations team to see, and control in real time, the temperature and humidity settings in their event facilities. Because of this awareness, Duke Athletics has both improved the comfort and thus the attendee experience, as well as minimized wasted hours of operation, resulting in $50,000 in year-over-year cost savings, and an estimated reduction of 105 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
Thermal Energy Storage operation: Utility and Engineering Services operates a five-million gallon chilled water storage and pumping system that allows Duke to shift how we supply cooling energy to our campus. As well as saving Duke over $280,000 this past year, Duke was able to take nearly 5 megawatts of electrical demand off of the NC grid, during the summer times when it’s most taxed. Ultimately, this kind of demand response reduces the number of peaking power generators that Duke Energy has to run.
Water Reclamation Pond operation: Duke’s water reclamation pond continues to pay dividends as a piece of green infrastructure. Duke reclaimed approximately 70 million gallons of stormwater and used it to operate Duke’s campus cooling system. Additionally, as this past year saw many flash flood events, the Pond did its job in slowing down heavy stormwater flows, minimizing erosion and improving water quality in the New Hope Creek watershed.