“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it.” -Alan Lakein
Has this happened to you? It’s Friday afternoon in early August, one of the hottest days of the year. You come home from work and the house is really warm. You check the thermostat, the A/C is not working. You call your heating and cooling contractor, they can get there on Saturday, but there will be an extra charge for weekend work. With Saturday comes the bad news, you need a new condenser, what size do you want? We can replace this four-ton unit with the same size and get it installed on Monday. What else can you say but, “Do it”. Replace “Like for Like.” It mostly worked in the past, and even if one that big isn’t needed and is more expensive, right now you don’t have time to consider other options.
How does this relate to energy use in larger institutional, commercial, or industrial buildings? Property owners certainly want to avoid hasty decisions on equipment replacement. In addition, every property owner or manager feels the need to reduce energy consumption and improve the comfort level of building occupants. Of course, these competing interests must be addressed with a limited budget. How do you move forward?
Consider crafting a long-term Energy Master Plan.
The Energy Master Plan creates a road map for an efficient, cost effective and robust infrastructure system. The plan starts by stating clearly the goals of your organization with respect to energy. Are you trying to properly manage your capital expenditures? Are you attempting to reduce your carbon footprint? Is it your goal to go Net-Zero? All of these are valid goals but they require specific details to put policy into place.
How to create an Energy Master Plan?
The Energy Master Plan is a rare opportunity to view the energy world from 30,000 feet, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Energy Master Plans are best when they are living documents. Though facilities layouts can last for hundreds of years, and equipment can last 10-40 years, space uses can change rapidly. Leadership goals can change as culture shifts, or administrations change hands. Utility incentive offerings, tax benefits, and fuel costs – the foundations of energy economics often shift on 3-5-year time-tables. A good Energy Master Plan will allow for changes to be made as priorities, planned uses, and economic environments shift. It looks ahead 5, 10, or 20+ years, and it starts with investigations in three areas.
- Goals: Begin by collecting goals the leadership of the organization has outlined relative to energy, directives around financial investment guidelines, and understanding the organization trajectory (is growth or renovation anticipated?). This is a good time to refine or develop an energy investment policy. This is a policy that provides guidance to the staff in the pursuit of energy efficiency and renewable energy investments. With this, you’ll know what energy targets are trying to be met, by when, and in what context.
- Building Utility Analyses: If there are multiple buildings, you need to know how they are they performing relative to each other. This understanding comes from a utility analysis and energy usage benchmarking and will be used in prioritizing projects.
- Equipment Life-Cycle: Next, check the inventory of energy-intensive equipment, and do brief site-inspections to understand the use, interdependencies, age, and condition of the sites and equipment. Conduct interviews with facilities departments and building occupants to understand chronic problem areas, departmental goals and timelines for building renovations and upgrades.
This will allow you to develop life-cycle costing analyses for the equipment – what is the full cost of ownership? Consider not just the upfront costs, but the “soft costs” of maintenance as well as equipment life span. Pay attention to which pieces of equipment need urgent repair or replacement, which can be upgraded without replacement, and the integrated impact. These data will also assist with prioritization.
Once you’ve gathered information on the goals, the buildings, and the equipment, you’ve got the materials for constructing your Energy Master Plan.
What are the elements of the Energy Master Plan?
The bones of the Energy Master Plan include: the goals, the needed work and timeline, and the forecasted costs and savings.
The Goals
The goals of the Energy Master Plan depend on the policy and investment guidelines as defined by the leadership of the organization. Given those investment criteria, and the timelines for achieving energy reductions, the master plan will include a description of the target operations for the building or campus. Are there capital investment projects planned for major equipment replacement, is a central-plant an option, or is there a directive to transitions to renewable fuels? These changes need to be rolled out in an organized way.
The Work and the Timeline
With the advantage of time and forethought, the Master Planning process allows you to improve function and resiliency, reduce costs, and have an integrated approach to achieving multiple objectives.
- It considers critical operational parameters and identifies areas where there is a need for resiliency or redundancy;
- It integrates equipment replacement schedules with planned building improvements;
- It plans for studies to re-evaluate loads served by these pieces of equipment to assure they are the correct size at the next replacement (reducing capital costs and improving function);
- It looks at opportunities to install new or improve existing automation systems (retro-commissioning), and add building submetering;
- It looks for opportunities to transition to more efficient system-wide approaches, and determines how to integrate them into the new whole (e.g., hotwater boilers are more efficient than steam and water cooled compressors are more efficient than air cooled);
- It identifies unknowns and the timing for initiating studies to uncover needed information, such as re-validation of building HVAC loads, or investigation of process load inefficiencies.
The above factors are used to develop a properly sequenced timeline of equipment improvements, replacements, and needed studies and preparatory work for cost-effective implementation. During the initial master-planning process, all the details will not be known, but general principles from experience guide the development of the timeline.
Forecasted Costs and Savings
General principles also guide cost and savings estimating. The Master Plan will show expected costs and savings from suggested initiatives and when they will occur. The recommended improvements are ones that have been tested against the energy investment criteria to assure that they meet management’s investment goals.
This financial analysis of the timeline gives budgetary guidance for an organization’s capital and operating cost forecasting. This part of the plan also gives the organization energy reduction targets to aim for at each step along the way, so on-going Measurement and Verifiication (M&V) of achieved savings can be compared to initial calculations done as part of the Master Planning, as well as more granular studies done as the plan is carried out.
The ERG planning process also lays out options and opportunities for securing third party financing, if needed, to secure the economic benefits the plan generates sooner rather than later.
Having the Energy Master Plan will avoid, “Our chiller just broke down and we don’t have time to research what we need, so let’s just throw in a chiller comparable to what we’re replacing”. With the plan, you’ll know how to reach your energy investment goals: what to do and when to do it.
Lastly, the exercise of drafting an Energy Master Plan allows us to “…bring the future into the present.” It’s a chance to really brainstorm about how the building interacts with the occupants, the city, and the climate. What do your people need? How much can you reduce your carbon footprint? Does it make sense to have solar panels on the roof top? How close can we get to Net Zero? What about new technology for onsite battery storage? These are all good questions that can be addressed.
It’s so much easier to get to your destination when you have a road map.
For a spirited conversation on your energy future, Contact Aaron Michels, Energy Resources Group, 314.644.0000.
