renovation program underway, and as we renovate some of our residence halls and academic and administrative facilities, we have been connecting the buildings to the 150 F hot water that’s coming from the geothermal system. We’re slowly adding more buildings to the system.
R:
We've estimated a 40 percent reduction in energy use on campus.
Are you noticing a difference in energy bills already?
LOWE: One of our big metrics is to look at steam peak loads before the geothermal and today, and it’s a remarkable reduction. We can also measure the fuel we’re burn- ing. We typically use three fuels: electrical, coal and natural gas. I can look at that from year to year, understanding we started the geothermal right after Thanksgiving last year and we were still commissioning the system, connecting buildings, working out the control sequences and so forth. But even in that small amount of time, we’ve seen a big reduction in our energy use. Just two weeks ago, I calculated our Btu consump- tion on campus based on square footage as right around 162,000 Btus per square foot. We’ve typically been up to 185,000. The re- duction was just partial load. We believe it will go down to 110,000 when the project is complete, and we’ve estimated a 40 percent reduction in energy use on campus.
R:
Where are the funds coming from for this project?
LOWE: The state of Indiana had appropri- ated, at our request, funds to replace those four coal boilers with a new coal boiler but when we had made the decision to move away from coal to geothermal, we went back to the state and asked whether we could use the funding to install a geother- mal-based system. The state agreed. This was 2009 when the Obama Administration made available stimulus money for energy efficiencies, including geothermal. We submitted a request and were successful in obtaining a $5 million U.S. Department of Energy grant that boosted the funding we had available to a little over 50 percent of what we need. Currently, we need addi- tional funds to finish the project. Hopefully with the work effort that is going into find- ing the funding, we’ll have it next year.
R:
How did construction of the borehole fields affect campus?
20 RETROFIT // September October 2012
LOWE: Boreholes take up a lot of space, and the ones we’re installing are spaced 15 feet on center because you don’t want one big heat exchanger to affect the next one to it; if there’s an overlap extracting or inserting energy you start to reduce perfor- mance. That essentially means 225 square feet is needed per borehole, and we’re in- stalling 3,600 boreholes, which gives us the capacity of Btus per hour we need to move energy into or out of the ground. That’s close to 25 acres we need for boreholes. We strategically located one field on
the north side of campus with 1,800 bore- holes. That area will remain a recreation field/parking lot. Another 1,800 boreholes will be dug on the south side of campus next to an area where we could build a building for heat-pump chillers and where our high-voltage distribution system is located, so it can electrically run the heat- pump chillers. The space on the south side is currently under construction and will be returned to a regulation soccer field.
success with others? R:
LOWE: Yes. During the last two years we’ve had campuses from across the country tour our progress. I was willing to spend hours on the phone so some of these folks wouldn’t have to travel, but Stanford wanted to send a team of people for three days. We’ve hosted the University of Kentucky, Michigan, Bowling Green. Many other universities have called to inquire how the geothermal is running. We’ve even had calls from as far away as Korea and Tokyo. Toronto is looking at in- stalling a similar system for its downtown; it would connect offices and other build- ings and become a distribution system for hot and chilled water. We are more than happy to share with anyone our lessons learned, successes and how the system is working for us currently, as well as what we plan to do to finish the project.
Other than being published in retrofit, are you sharing your