OSU Energy Center

Oregon State University (OSU) is nationally recognized for its forward-looking commitment to sustainability, efficiency and renewable energy. But seven years ago, its 1920s-era heat plant, which provided steam to most campus buildings, was an inefficient relic of the past. Not only was the old building structurally unsound, but the plant’s 1950s-era equipment was rapidly deteriorating.

“The old heat plant was held together with duct tape and bailing wire,” said Henry Alaman, development manager for Oregon State University. “Only three of the building’s five boilers worked and if the outside temperature dipped below 27 degrees, we couldn’t heat the campus. If we lost another boiler, the campus wouldn’t run.”

Facing imminent failure, the OSU and the Oregon University System made replacing the plant a top priority. And when a new energy center was funded in the 2003-2005 budget, OSU committed to providing increased capacity to its growing campus in an environmentally and socially responsible way.

“We said if we’re going to do it, we need do it big,” explains Alaman. “We knew that we needed to do the right thing by going green. But we also wanted to make the building an attractive place where employees wanted to work each day.”

Fast forward to 2010: the new $55 million OSU Energy Center is now online, providing steam and electricity throughout campus. A co-generating – or combined heat and power – facility, the Energy Center was designed to LEED platinum building standards, and, was the first university energy center in the nation to achieve such status in the U.S.

Co-generating facilities are now used on many college campuses because they offer high efficiency and enhanced reliability. The new facility will also allow OSU to reduce air emissions, including an estimated 38 percent reduction in greenhouse gasses.

Replacing the old steam plant with a co-generating facility allows OSU to generate approximately 50 percent of the university’s electricity on-site, increasing its efficiency by lowering transmission losses. Further increasing efficiency, the Energy Center utilizes waste heat from the electrical generation process to produce the whole campus’ steam load for heating and waste heat from the steam generation process to heat the building itself. The Energy Center can also operate on a variety of liquid and gas fuel sources, including biofuels. This allows the university flexibility in choosing the lowest cost fuel as market conditions change, and to use locally produced biofuels as they become available.

A longtime commissioning supporter, the university brought Heery’s commissioning team onto the project early in the design phase to provide a third-party review of the design and construction process. Heery’s early involvement brought a commissioning agent’s perspective to technical issues during the design phase, helping avoid potential problems later in construction. During construction, Heery was on-site, providing technical coordination and confirming that any deficiencies were corrected. The outcome was a smoother project with fewer surprises.

Since staff buy-in was essential to making the new Energy Center a success, the OSU facilities staff was incorporated into the project. “From the initial design phase through commissioning, we had our staff fully integrated into the project team,” says Alaman. The result of their involvement with Heery’s commissioning team: a greater sense of ownership in the building.

The staff also has a better understanding of why and how the center works. During functional testing, the facilities’ staff worked side-by-side with Heery’s commissioning agents, learning how the systems operate and work efficiently.

“Comparing our old steam plant with the new Energy Center is like contrasting 1880s steam boiler-technology to a jet-engine turbine,” said Alaman. “There is a huge technological jump between the two and we wanted to give our staff all the tools to fully understand their new environment.”

To maximize efficiency, the university went out of its way to provide the highest level of training – they asked Heery to provide the facility staff with full functional training, a level of staff education not commonly seen on projects. From the beginning of construction through occupancy, Heery worked closely with the staff, providing electrical and mechanical fundamentals, and demonstrating not only how each individual system works, but how the plant works together as a whole.

“OSU wanted each of the operators to know how to run the plant in the safest and most efficient way,” says Geoff Wampler, Heery’s commissioning agent for the project. “We gave the staff a holistic overview of the plant – each staff member received training on failure scenarios as well as how to operate and maintain the specialized systems and equipment. We essentially trained each of the boiler operators to become co-gen operators.”

Now, even as its campus grows, OSU can now count on meeting its energy needs in a reliable, more efficient manner.