Examination of Laboratory Expansion Impact on Optimized Central Plant System

Tim Kehrli, TLK Consulting

Abstract:

The EPA National Vehicle Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, MI has been the source of several studies on the success of performance contracting in a laboratory environment. Parts of this success has been due to the ability of the ESPC contractor to optimize the central plant equipment to meet the needs of the facility, but not overbuild to keep the retrofit investment affordable. As the second full year of performance comes to a close the EPA has indicated that there are plans to increase the size of the facility and would like to connect all of the new space conditioning equipment into the existing central plant.

This paper will examine the process of determining the planned load of the additional space and the economic analysis that will be used to determine how best to integrate the additional loads into the performance contract without losing the performance guarantees of the current agreement.

During the course of the economic analysis the paper will also examine the relative impact of laboratory operations on the performance of the ESPC retrofit. The purpose of the review will be to determine the sensitivity of the ESPC savings to increased operations with the efficient system versus limited operations of a reduced lab mission. It is believed that the bias of savings would favor increased operations and thus the greater the system load the lower the net operating costs for the lab addition. This is limited of course by the ability of the plant to service the load, but knowing the bias will assist the EPA in determining to increase the central plant rather than add package AHU's to handle the new space load.

Biography:

Not available at this time.