Harker School Saves 13% in Energy Costs With SeriousEnergy Manager

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Harker School

The Harker School Manages Energy Consumption

SEM Harker School Case Study

From its early beginnings in 1893, The Harker School has established itself as a leading preparatory school with students going on to prestigious universities worldwide. Harker's mission has remained constant: to create an environment that promotes academic excellence, inspires intellectual curiosity, expects personal accountability and forever instills a genuine passion for learning. The Harker School is located in San Jose, California, and is spread across three campuses with five buildings in the upper campus, four in the middle campus and six in the lower campus serving over 1750 students.

Joe Rosenthal, Executive Director of Advancement and Mike Bassoni, Director of Facilities, explained that Harker School had a mandate for 2009; improve the education program while reducing costs. Based on this mandate, Harker and SeriousEnergy together devised 3 key goals:

1. Improve the education program. Identifying opportunities to engage the student body in energy conservation measures.
2. Green the campus. Improving energy efficiency and lowering Harker's carbon footprint.
3. Cut costs. Identifying a solution that will cut energy costs with a payback on investment of less than 2 years.

Challenges

Joe and Mike were motivated by energy conscious students (through HEART – Harker Environment And Recycling Team) that had already taken environmentally friendly measures to save energy such as installing film on windows to reduce heat gain from the sun and creating 'green roofs' by placing small plants on top of buildings to reduce heat absorption. In order to meet these goals, Mike identified the challenges they would need to overcome:

No real-time visibility into energy consumption at the campus and building level.
Lack of visibility into heating and cooling schedules and performance. They were unable to indentify whether their HVAC systems were consuming too much energy.
No ability to identify if other energy loads were consuming unnecessary energy during the off-hours.
Students could not see or track the impact of their energy conservation efforts.

Solution

The Harker School partnered with SeriousEnergy to identify a solution. Working with a local systems integrator, SeriousEnergy installed an Echelon SmartServer and electricity sub-meters in the buildings on the Upper and Lower campuses. The SmartServer was selected as the product that best met the needs of Harker from a functionality and cost perspective. The SmartServer acts as a gateway device for all the electricity meters and provides a web services interface for the SeriousEnergy Manager software to connect remotely through a SaaS architecture.

Results

At the end of each month, Mike receives a comprehensive report assembled by SeriousEnergy analysts. This report highlights total energy usage and trends for each day, the associated energy cost, detected anomalies and actionable recommendations. In 2010, using the SeriousEnergy Manager, Mike was able to identify and fix:

Air conditioning systems that were running during off-hours. Mike changed the schedule on the AC.
Non-critical outdoor lights were remaining on at night past the campus operating hours. Mike plans to put a timer on these lights to turn them off at night.
Short-cycling equipment. Rooftop Units (RTU's) were turning on for very short periods of time. Mike installed a timer on the fan circuit to turn it off at night.

Since February 1st 2010, Harker has seen over 13% in electricity cost savings, relative to last year’s bill. Using the recommendations in the monthly report, Mike has begun to implement changes across the campus. The continuous energy savings are forecasted to result in less than 2-year payback for the entire SeriousEnergy solution.

Using the SeriousEnergy Manager, Harker was able to raise student awareness, which led to the creation of SmartPowerEd.org by the students to promote energy conservation awareness across California and the United States.

Next Steps

Looking to the future, Mike plans to leverage the combined functionality of the SeriousEnergy Manager and SmartServer to control the A/C systems and lighting systems in real-time.

The SeriousEnergy Manager also has a Public Dashboard that can be used to display campus energy data on screens throughout the campus. As part of SmartPowerEd.org, the students plan to use the Public Dashboard along with the SeriousEnergy Manager iPhone application to have energy savings competitions between students and eventually schools across the country.