Stanford University
IN-24: Innovation A

Stanford’s Executive Director of Sustainability and Energy Management developed a modeling tool to determine the optimal daily operation of Stanford’s new heat-recovery central energy facility. Once patented, Stanford collaborated with Johnson Controls to transform the tool into an industrial-grade software, known as Enterprise Optimization Solution (EOS), and to hardwire it into Stanford’s energy system. EOS is now both an energy modeling and dispatch system using over 1,220 variables (including building occupancy, ambient conditions, time of year, projected energy prices, weather forecast, current system conditions, etc.) to develop 15-minute dispatches that show the optimal way to run the plant. The system predicts the university’s background electrical profile for the next ten days and schedules hourly operations of the plant’s heat recovery chillers, conventional chillers, hot water generators, and thermal storage tanks each day so as to minimize the overall electrical footprint of the university on the grid and avoid the use of this energy-intensive equipment during peak hours. EOS will perform this forward-looking analysis and recalibrate the machine operating schedules as needed every 15 minutes on a continual basis. It can be used be used in either advisory or fully automated modes. The software also has a Planning Tool aspect that can be used by energy operations personnel to forecast future loads and model plant operations needs for the future. EOS is currently the only sophisticated tool to measure the potential for district-level heat recovery. As a result, Stanford has shared it with many other institutions that are interested in heat recovery for their campuses.