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Spotlight
Technology for the Physical Plant: Building Smarts
7/5/2007
While many of these efforts have been successful, they are not without their tests. For instance: How do IT managers justify capital expenditures on new tech products, when the goal is to save money? How do campuses raise conservation awareness among students and faculty members? Academic technologists are compelled to answer questions like these, but sometimes the answers aren’t easy ones.
Penn State: Centralizing Energy Management
At Pennsylvania State University, technologists have built a comprehensive energy management system around a solution called Itron. Dubbed the Guaranteed Energy Savings Program (GESP), the effort also incorporates hardware from building efficiency vendor Johnson Controls, enterprise resource planning software from Metasys, and a variety of other products and technologies.
A CENTRALIZED ENERGY MANAGEMENT system at Penn State allows HVAC, lighting, and security data from multiple buildings to be interpreted, stored, and commanded in one system.
The $3.4 million project was launched in 2006; thus far, it involves 50 of 600 buildings on campus. In a nutshell, the system brings together all of the campus building automation systems; factors in outside data about outside temperatures; and compares this information to a class roster to determine which classrooms are occupied, and when. The goals, according to Energy Program Engineer Laura Miller, are to improve efficiency and cut costs.
“We’re trying to get a system that has all of this information in one place so that when we do our energy management, we can go to one source instead of several different sources,” she says. “Centralizing these tasks makes it easier for everyone, not to mention the fact that it also just makes sense.”
In the past, each building was controlled separately with hardware from various vendors. Because the hardware was different in each building, most of the structures had their own building automation systems (BAS) that controlled HVAC, lighting, and security. These systems made it easy to manage energy on a building-by-building basis. Controlling multiple buildings was difficult, however, since one system didn’t talk to the others.
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