Cooling tank may save money
Fences went up on Feb. 15 to mark off a portion of the HPER field where a new thermal energy storage tank (TES tank) is being built.
Darrell Hart, associate vice president of Facilities, said the central cooling plant on campus is running out of the air conditioning capacity needed to satisfy all buildings, but this tank will help remedy the problem.
“We either had to buy another chiller or construct this tank,” Hart said.
He said USU’s air conditioning system currently runs on four chillers, but the central cooling plant only has room to add one more chiller.
Ben Berrett, director of Facilities Planning, Design and Construction, said “adding additional chillers doesn’t save money, this does.”
Lorin Mortensen, mechanical engineer for USU Facilities Planning, Design and Construction, said the system could save the university around $100,000 per year in electricity costs.
Berrett said, “That’s under current prices. Those savings could be larger if power rates go up.”
“It saves us money by reducing the amount we pay for electricity. We can run our chillers at night during the off-peak hours when energy costs are lower,” Mortensen said.
“Typically, we run those chillers during the peak heat part of the day, which is also the time of peak energy cost,” Hart said. “Cold water storage will chill the water at night when energy costs are low.”
Berrett said the tank is 30 feet tall, will hold 2 million gallons of water and will be completely buried under the HPER field by December of this year. He also said the field is expected to re-open at that time.
Meanwhile, Facilities asks for students to have patience as construction continues on the north end of the field.
Berrett said that every precaution is being taken to ensure safety around the construction zone, especially considering the proximity of the Edith Bowen Laboratory school. He said large dump trucks and cement trucks will be coming in and out over the next few months.
“It’s an inconvenience to students who want to use the field, but in the big picture it will save a lot of money,” Mortensen said.
Berrett said that the project doesn’t only save money.
“It is a buffer to our system, if our chillers go offline, the system can run off the tank until we get things restarted.”
He said this is critical in temperature sensitive places, such as the USU data center, where campus servers operate.
“This makes our chilled water system more stable and dependable.” He said.
Hart said, “There was a power outage at the central energy plant and we couldn’t make chilled water, we started seeing problems in places like the data center within 15 minutes.”
He said the new tank will be able to cool down the data center, and other places on campus, in case of an emergency or if some maintenance is required at the central cooling plant.
“We already have a small thermal energy storage tank used to cool the NFS building, we built that about five years ago and it works really well,” Berrett said.
The overall cost of the project is about $2.5 million, but it absolutely saves money, Hart said.
“Little maintenance will need to be done,” Mortensen said. “There will be some temperature sensors that will need to be calibrated every few years.”
Berrett said, “There will be inspections on the inside of the tank for sediment and cracks and leaks, but it will be almost maintenance free.”
Hart said this is a great time to start the project because construction companies are competitively seeking contracts.
“There were eight or nine firms interested, and we narrowed that down to three firms who drew up proposals and had ties to specialty tank manufacturers, and then we chose the best of the three,” he said.
Hart said he feels the school is getting the best price, the best product and the best schedule that is available.
– keaton.reed@aggiemail.usu.edu