Dedicated conservation engineer saves U-M $3.6M in energy costs

Faced with ever-declining funding from the state, the University of Michigan is squeezing as much slack as it can from its operating costs. Enter Jim Almashy, energy conservation engineer for U-M's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), who's charged with spotting opportunities for utility cost savings and resource conservation for U-M's largest college, where fall 2010 enrollment exceeded 19,000 students.

When Almashy's position was created in 2007, LSA was spending $16 million on utilities each year. "[LSA] felt that number was just going to continue to rise as natural gas costs increased, as electric costs increased," Almashy says, "They recognized that they had to do something, and they had to do it specific to their school because the campus is large and they needed somebody that could just focus on how the buildings operated."

Almashy works with the U-M Office of Campus Sustainability's Planet Blue operations teams to look at the occupancy and types of systems in the 30 buildings housing the college's classrooms, auditoriums, offices, and laboratories. By focusing on the energy cost center over the past few years, in 2010 alone, LSA's utility bills fell by $3.6 million over the prior year, while energy and steam usage dropped by 26 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Almashy expects similar savings in 2011.

In a college where the Chemistry Building alone eats up about 25% of energy expenditures, the savings has come through experimentation. Efforts were aimed at reducing the use of air conditioning systems deploying water as a coolant, for example.

"A lot of the systems we have here use city water, one time down the drain," he notes. Accordingly, about 80 roto vapors, used by scientists to create vacuums for experiments, were replaced with a product using compressed air instead of water to drive the vacuum.

The next big focus in the science arena is making sure systems are properly calibrated, Almashy says. In the Chemistry Building alone, there are 423 hoods "where we're bringing in conditioned air, either heated or air conditioned through our fume hoods, and our exhaust systems and exhausting it out the door."

His team has also developed four different fan schedules for each college building, bringing potential usage down from 24-7, or 168 hours per week, to about 35 hours.

The single fix with the biggest bang for the buck? Over one summer, the college has saved $125,000 by trading in steam-generated air conditioning systems – inexpensive to install but costly to run – in Ruthven Museum and Lorch Hall for rented portable electric chillers.

Almashy credits these successes to having the buy-in of university officials, who back his experimentation. "That's a different mindset from what we have done in the past. Before, people said, 'The buildings's there, let it run, it'll be fine.' And now they're realizing that you just can't run a facility that way."

Sources: Jim Almashy, energy conservation engineer for U-M's College of LSA; U-M Office of the Registrar
Writer: Tanya Muzumdar