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Chair's Update 1st Quarter 2010

By Juan Ontiveros posted 06-25-2017 16:20

  

This new year arrived a lot faster than others I can recall, and just around the corner is IDEA's Campus Energy Conference set for Feb. 9–­12 in Reno. I look forward to being there and hearing from my peers about the challenges and successes at their institutions. The economic downturn continues to affect all of us to varying degrees, but I am hopeful that in 2010 we'll see things start to get back to normal. Yet the pressure to cut costs while improving the bottom line is likely to remain!

In November, I had the pleasure of participating with IDEA President Rob Thornton in the first District Energy Climate Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was an incredible honor to attend the conference and to learn about great district energy projects worldwide as well as the international politics of global climate change. I agree with the summit organizers who said that energy is vital to the functioning of our societies and that district heating and cooling is a key to sustainability.

I was struck by the passion I saw in the international participants for tapping renewable energy, combined heat and power and energy­efficiency opportunities to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. I had the pleasure of touring a number of Danish energy facilities that reflect this passion, including central Copenhagen's Amager­forbrænding waste­to­energy plant; a wood chip­burning facility in Elsinore that serves the region including Kronberg Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site; a 32,292­ sq ­ft (3,000­ sq­ m) solar thermal plant that serves a new high­efficiency housing development in Hillerod; and Copenhagen's first district cooling plant. Copenhagen Energy also gave me a personal presentation on the company's steam and hot water district heating network, control systems and optimization systems. These organizations are all world ­class and have much to be proud of.

As I visited these facilities and operations, I was impressed with their high level of automation, their intense commitment to optimization and their desire to continuously improve. These tenets are all very near and dear to my heart, so what I saw very much struck a chord with me. These organizations were not only willing to share their successes, but they were also open to learning about our accomplishments too.

Those of us who operate plants and buildings learned long ago that digital controls and historical data gathering are essential to successfully operate a plant to its full potential. I believe, however, that the ante has been upped to the point where this is not enough: We also need to develop real­time models of our systems that allow us to manage plant performance and distribution systems on a real­time basis. It is too costly to instrument everything to populate the energy models, so we need to take advantage of the state­of­the­art modeling and operational tools available in the industry. This will allow us to use limited actual data and let the model predict the rest of the system conditions. While this may sound futuristic, let me assure you they have been doing it for years in Denmark, and we at the University of Texas at Austin have also started to do this with good results.

While we can learn much from conferences and summits, we can also gain insight from our peers through the articles in District Energy magazine. I encourage you to take time to read this issue, noting that our campus host has had a hot water district heating system for more than 100 years, the Oregon Institute of Technology is expanding its geothermal system, and the State of California has debuted its new LEED®-­certified central plant at the State Capitol Campus. And that's just for starters.

As IDEA members, we not only need to continue to educate ourselves on the technology but our legislators about dis­trict energy, CHP and the possibilities they offer. At the District Energy Climate Summit I learned — somewhat to my dismay — that educating public and government leaders is a challenge that is not unique to the United States. Even though so much has been accomplished in Europe and around the world, other countries also struggle to get the traction needed to get more accomplished with CHP and district energy.

The summit organizers released five recommendations for legislators that I have summarized as follows:

  1. Pay more attention to heating and cooling markets in relation to legislation.
  2. Prioritize more action in urban areas by promoting heating and cooling infrastructure.
  3. Acknowledge district heating and cooling as an important climate change tool.
  4. Focus on system efficiency by pro­moting the integration of supply­and demand­side policies.
  5. Create a framework for benchmarking and transferring the best technologies and legislative practice for the long term.

I believe that these recommendations hit the target for IDEA members and our colleagues abroad. We're in this together. It's up to us to tell our story.

Juan Ontiveros
Chair, 2009-2010
Executive Director of Utilities and Energy Management
The University of Texas at Austin



#2010 #Q1 #ChairsCorner #UniversityofTexasAustin
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