Energy and operational savings turn facilities into A PROFIT CENTER

Visit Victor Atherton, the associate vice president of facility administration at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., and you will likely find him fiddling with programmable thermostats, compact fluorescent lamps and valves on low-flow plumbing fixtures. And that's before he leaves for the office.

Once at work, he moves on to his professional challenge: figuring out how to reduce energy and operating costs to run the 100 university-owned facilities on the same amount of money as in 1989.

"Energy conservation has always been important to me in my personal and professional life," Atherton says. "If you come to my house, you would lind compact fluorescent lamps, a programmable thermostat, high-efficiency air conditioning equipment and water-saving plumbing fixtures - all installed long before they were code-required."

Atherton is on a mission to snuff out energy inefficiency and any other waste that forces him to spend even a penny more than he did 14 years ago to operate the 4 million square feet that comprise the university's Coral Gables campus facilities. The reason he lives with such a tight budget restriction is simple: He asked for it.

Atherton moved to the main campus at a time when incandescent light bulbs, proprietary control systems and inefficient use of chiller plants were the norm. After seeing how the various systems could be upgraded and made more efficient, Atherton went to top university administrators with a proposition.

Atherton wanted the university to freeze the facilities budget at its 1989 level in exchange for being allowed to keep within the department any money he didn't spend. He would still get increases allocated for university-mandated raises and new buildings, but that's it. Any additional funds he needed would have to be borrowed from the university and repaid.

While the proposal sounded risky to some, Atherton knew there was enough inefficiency within the department for him to not only live within the budget, but to sock away extra to start reducing a deferred maintenance backlog. From the university's perspective, Atherton says, the arrangement made it easy on the financial people because facilities would no longer be nagging for more money.

"They love it," he says. "They absolutely love it."

With the university in agreement with his proposal, Atherton took to zapping squandered kilowatt-hours. One of the largest energy-saving projects the facility department undertook involved integrating three chilled water plants into a single chilled water loop.

When the project started in 1992, the university used three chilled water plants to cool 13 buildings. One plant served seven buildings, another served five and the third was serving only the library. Atherton's plan called for creating a single chilled water loop, connecting the three plants and converting old buildings to chilled water - creating a "conduit of efficiency," Atherton says. "When it was completed we could run the entire academic campus on one chilled water plant. The other two could be used as backup systems."

To implement the plan, Atherton first had to go to the board of trustees and borrow money to build the loop. Borrowing the money was no hurdle because calculations showed the savings the university would realize through the new loop would repay the school in less than three years. As the plan progressed, Atherton realized there were more advantages to be had. The university was able to upgrade all of its chillers to high-efficiency units and install variable speed pumping units. Sixty-one percent of costs of those upgrades were paid through energy grants and rebates from the local utility, so he only had to borrow 39 percent of project costs.

The university started saving money immediately. The chilled water loop allowed the university to cool 22 buildings from a single chiller plant and add 1,235 tons of new load. At the same time, the university qualified for a new lower electricity rate. Where the school had been paying 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour to produce air conditioning, it was now paying 5.8 cents. The new rate and the increased efficiency of the chillers - .51 kw per ton instead of 1 kw per ton -saved the university $800,000 annually. In addition, it has 100 percent backup cooling capacity in the two remaining plants that were once used for prime cooling.

ENERGY MATTERS

Since Atherton moved to the main campus, energy use at the university has been cut by 25 percent per square foot. He says the reduction would have been 6 percent greater if it weren't for the addition of computers, Internet servers and other electronic equipment in the past decade or so. Atherton says the facility department essentially financed the additional energy costs created by the computer revolution.

That Atherton would concentrate efforts on reducing energy used by HVAC systems should surprise no one. In addition to having earned a degree in mechanical engineering, he developed hands-on and technical skills regarding air-conditioning systems through work to earn his journeyman and master mechanical licenses. A lot of the influence to learn about those systems came in high school when Atherton was pulling wires and mounting electrical boxes to help his dad's part-time air conditioning contracting business. He even learned enough about metalwork to fabricate ductwork.