Energy / Huntington Beach, California: 2010 Smarter City - Energy

     

3 Birds with One Commissioning

The latest on its list of victories is the city’s recent investment in a Monitoring Based Commissioning process for the local Civic Center Complex. Monitoring Based Commissioning (MBCx), says the city’s Energy Project Manager Aaron Klemm, “is a top-to-bottom building tune-up that takes into account the building as a whole instead of its individual parts.” In this case, the whole is a cluster of municipal buildings constructed in the 1970s and connected through a system of underground hallways: including an administrative office complex, the Council Chambers Building and the Police Department and jail facility. The complex is “189,000 square feet that was wasting a fair amount of energy,” says Klemm.

The last updates to the buildings were in the late 1990s when the HVAC, lighting and chiller systems were all upgraded. MBCx for the complex took eight months and $250,000, but the city has seen a more than 200% return on its investment and has cut electricity use in those buildings by 21.3% and natural gas use by 33.6%—resulting in $135,228 a year in utility savings. The savings will grow as more identified retrofits are implemented and city and building staff, who have been trained in the diagnostic process, catch problems earlier.

 

Combined Efforts with County-wide Benefits

In keeping with the theme of comprehensive energy monitoring, Huntington Beach will soon have a much needed energy management program to help track municipal energy use. The Enterprise Energy Information Management System (EEIMS) “promotes energy literacy in local governments,” but, says Klemm, “the reality is that there are a lot of medium to small cities that don’t have this technology and they need a pathway to get it.” To remedy that issue in Orange County, five cities in The Orange County Cities Energy Leader Partnership are combining efforts, and resources, to procure the expensive system for Orange County. The program provides cities with EPA Energy Star benchmarking, measurement and verification for energy efficiency projects and carbon reporting. EEIMS is part of the partnership’s effort to encourage local government energy efficiency policies in Orange County and to share information about each member city’s own local effort.

For now, Klemm and his team are busy retrofitting lighting in public areas like parks and parking garages, upgrading parking meters to PV powered next generation systems and installing 12.5 acres of solar panels—good for 2.5 megawatts of energy and slated to begin generating in the summer of 2012.