University of Louisville
OP-5: Building Energy Consumption

The baseline was created during our first greenhouse gas emissions inventory conducted in 2009-2010. It involved three years of prior data and was as far back as we had reliable data.

In 2012, UofL installed real-time energy-monitoring and display technology in four residence halls: Unitas Tower, Louisville Hall, Kurz Hall, and Community Park. These online Building Dashboards allow residents to get a handle on their energy usage and to get real-time feedback about conservation efforts within these residence halls. Our Building Dashboards help UofL residents gauge progress during our annual energy conservation competition and helped UofL finish in the top ten energy reducers in the spring 2012 Campus Conservation Nationals! UofL's new LEED Gold Student Recreation Center opened in October 2013, featuring geothermal heating and cooling, solar hot water, rainwater capture & storage for irrigation, and a Siemens building dashboard available in the lobby on an interactive touch-screen that displays the performance of these systems.

The Siemens Apogee software and the TAC I/A software include scheduling features which allow building HVAC units to be turned off and/or temperatures to be set back during unoccupied times. These software systems are used for the vast majority of buildings on campus. The University shall strive to maintain room temperatures as follows: During Heating Season: Occupied Hours 66-72 Degrees F. Unoccupied Hours 55-65 Degrees F. During Cooling Season: Occupied Hours 74-78 Degrees F. Unoccupied Hours 78-85 Degrees F.

UofL is beginning to install LED lighting, with its first major installation in outdoor lighting for a new parking lot featuring dozens of lights.

UofL's LEED Gold Student Recreation Center opened in October 2013, featuring not only a 134 MMBtu solar hot water system, but 128,000 square feet of space heated and cooled by the University's first geothermal system. The geothermal heat pipe is a closed-loop vertical well system with a total of 180 wells 400 feet deep. This 4960 MMBtu system provides ample reserve capacity and is expected to generate about 22% annual energy cost savings compared to a conventional system. It is also considerably simpler and cheaper to maintain. Occupational use of the new facility has tripled when compared to the previous Recreational Center, yet energy costs were reduced to provide UofL with almost $100,000 of savings per year. We are investigating renewable energy options to passively heat & cool UofL buildings. At Burhans Hall on our Shelby campus, in collaboration with the Department of Energy and the Kentucky Renewable Energy Consortium, UofL's Renewable Energy Applications Laboratory (REAL) installed an experimental solar heat pipe wall for indoor climate control that may prove to be twice as efficient as other solar systems in places such as Louisville with moderate sun and cold winters. In 2011, the system was moved for further experimentation and monitoring to a new Passive Solar Test Facility constructed at the Speed School of Engineering at the Brook Street railroad fly-over, just south of Eastern Pkwy. This is the only such device of its kind in the world. The walls, floor and roof are built with structural insulated panels (SIP’s). The building is divided into two rooms with an insulated interior wall to allow side-by-side testing of two systems. Currently installed are two solar heat pipe systems, which produce net heat gains approximately twice as large as typical direct gain systems. Heating performance of these two prototypes has been compared, and strategies for reducing unwanted gains during the summer have also been tested. These experiments were funded by the Department of Energy, and are reported in the following articles: 1. Robinson BS & Sharp MK, “Reducing unwanted gains during the cooling season for a solar heat pipe system,” Solar Energy 115:16-32, 2015. 2. Robinson BS & Sharp MK, “Heating season performance improvements for a solar heat pipe system,” Solar Energy 110:39-49, 2014. 3. Robinson BS, Chmielewski NE, Knox Kelecy A, Brehob EG, Sharp MK, “Heating season performance of a full-scale heat pipe assisted solar wall,” Solar Energy 87:76–83, 2013.

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UofL has made massive investments to retrofit its existing facilities in order to increase the efficiency of our operations, reduce costs, consume less energy and water, and produce less pollution as a result. This $50 million project, involving 88 buildings (6.2 million square feet) on all three UofL campuses will directly save the university $4.4 million every year and reduce our annual carbon dioxide emissions alone by over 46,000 tons (the equivalent of removing 7,690 cars from the road). With these improvements, UofL expects to reduce its utility bill by about $12,086 per day! These efforts have already produced documented results. In FY 2011-12, Belknap Campus reduced fuel use 48%, electricity use 27%, and water use 31%. Efficiency-minded campus users helped us exceed our engineers' expectations! They had predicted fuel use to decline nearly 40% and electricity use to drop at least 20% annually.