Resource Stewardship and Sustainability: Energy

The Facility Service group is taking the following actions to reduce the environmental impact of Baylor College of Medicine's operations through the following energy sustainability programs:

We began using variable speed drives to control the speed of motors driving pumps, cooling tower fans and air conditioning fans in 1989. Since that time we have installed these drives on over 200 pieces of equipment. These controllers allow us to match the water or air moved through the system to the demand in a much more accurate way. The savings derived from these units is the cubed of the speed reduction. So a speed reduction from 100 percent to 80 percent results in an energy / cost savings of 49%. We save over $250,000 per year using these speed controllers.

In 1992, we started a program to replace the two least efficient chillers (.95 KW / Ton) with state of the art chillers (.62 KW / Ton). Each of the chillers we replaced was 800 tons in size. The energy savings associated with replacing these two chillers amounts to 528 KW per hour or 1.5 million KWH per year (calculated running 33% of the time). This equates to a savings of $145,000 per year.