Grant submitted

Alan Peterson, the Facilities Manager for the schools, put together a $500,000 grant application for a FY15 Community Innovation Challenge Grant that was submitted today, to centralize the management of all building for the town.  This is from the grant application –

 
The Grant will be used to purchase goods, services and software to provide easier Community use of School facilities and better energy management of Town Facilities.

A third party provider, under a DOER contract will provide a single Web-Based interface to schedule  and control building automation of all Public Facilities.

At present, each building’s heating, ventilation and cooling system control is ‘stand-alone’. Each system has is limitations, and most of the control systems do not allow component control or detail  trouble­ shooting.

The Web-interface will provide building occupants with comfortable temperatures based on planned use of spaces, and un-occupy spaces or buildings for energy savings, based on authorized input for  Snow days, holidays, etc. Improved control will result from retro-commissioning of the systems.

The interface will tie into each building’s main electric meter to log instantaneous power use, so a dashboard of energy use for all Town Buildings can be seen by the public. Where feasible, natural gas meters will be monitored also. Data will be easily manipulated on the Web dashboard to benchmark energy use against various standards.

Objectives of the initiative include improved performance of existing building control systems, broader application of best practices for energy conservation, improved comfort for employees and other building users, transparent accounting of energy units used and simplified auditing for commissioning [and retro­ commissioning] of building equipment and controls.
At present, only a few of the Town and School buildings have web-based operability, some areas of those buildings would benefit from retro-commissioning.  Most buildings have stand-alone operability, or intra­ net network control from other buildings on the same school network.
Shutting down building heating ventilation and cooling system equipment for holidays, snow days or creating special occupancies  requires a skilled building operator to make multiple site visits and use different operating platforms. The newly created Town-wide Energy Manager will find it challenging to interact with so many building control systems. The department personnel now
authorized to control building systems do not often share information about building control issues, so opportunities to learn best practices and to implement and measure improvements are infrequent. The new energy manager will improve that situation.

Efforts to improve building systems operation have included focused service contracts with the several contractors that support the various systems, and routine meetings with personnel operating those systems. Gaging the level of performance improvement is rather subjective at present, in part due to the manual monthly rollup and comparison of energy bills.

Upgrading to an ‘umbrella’ web-based interface will allow the present department personnel to continue to run their buildings, while allowing the Energy Manager to also have appropriate access and establishing a dashboard for any interested party to see.

This capital project will involve a series of one-time expenses, to be followed by changes in on-going service contracts. Part of the vetting process to select the vendor to implement this project will include projected pricing for service agreements after the project completion. These costs must be comparable to the present level of service costs for each involved department. We are
requesting that budget administrators use some of the savings realized from operation efficiencies realized by the project to cover newly incurred support costs.

The project must be sufficiently funded with seed money to allow completion of critical steps to assure a phased implementation will be successful, without requiring additional funding from already stressed
departmental capital budgets.