Welcome to the campus energy and sustainability podcast. In each episode, we talk with leading campus professionals, thought leaders, engineers, and innovators addressing the unique challenges and opportunities facing higher ed and corporate campuses. Our discussions are ranged from energy conservation and efficiency, to planning and finance, from building science to social science, from energy systems to food systems. We hope you're ready to learn, share and ultimately accelerate your institution towards solutions. I'm your host, Dave Karlsgodt. I'm a director of energy and advisory services at Brailsford & Dunlavey.
And that kind of gets to that design to the 90% and not the 10%. And so if you're on a university, your job is to help educate people, I believe, right? And so so how can we inspire the students? Ifbetter is possible, good is not enough. Think about what you're doing, right? Think about how can we get the most bang for our buck out of this widget?
In this episode, you'll hear my interview with Kenny Seeton, Central Plant and Energy Manager at California State University Dominguez Hills. Our wide ranging conversation spans everything from LED retrofits to solar powered golf carts. Kenny talks about how to safely take risks and how to connect systems seeking continuous improvement. He offers up sound advice for energy managers on metering, sensors, occupancy controls, valves and dampers, trend analysis, and even phase change materials. While we will most definitely geek out in this episode, I think you'll find Kenny's boundless energy and creativity will keep you as engaged as it did for me. I hope you enjoy this interview recorded November 23 2020.
Well, Kenny, it's great to have you here on the podcast.
Hey, Dave, thanks for having me here.
All right, well, let's start out just give us a little bit of background on who you are and where you are.
Alright, great. So I'm Kenny Seeton. I am the Energy Manager/Chief Engineer or Plant Manager here at California State University, Dominguez Hills. I've been here since 2011. Ironically, I never thought that I would end up at a university like this. I spent 27 years working for Hostess Cupcakes, Twinkies, and really loved what I did. Heard about this job for five years, because I replaced one of those chief engineers that was going to retire forever. And the first three, four years, I said, "Nah, why would I want to go there? That's got to be the boringest job in the world, just running fans." Turns out that, you know, after 27 years, even I started thinking it was time to get off a graveyard. So threw my hat in the ring, got the job here. And who knew that, you know, I'd died and gone to heaven at this job that was really designed exactly for me.
That's, that's interesting. I didn't know. I think you'd mentioned the hostess background. But I didn't realize you'd been there that long. Were you working in facilities there? What were you doing?
Yeah, it started off as greasing equipment, worked my way up to the assistant chief engineer. So I spent like, half of my career there on the floor and the other half as the assistant chief engineer. But in the manufacturing world, as lean as it is, I was I was on the floor working whenever something needed help. The beauty of that career education that I got, and you know, instead of waiting for "where'd you go to school," that's where I went to school, right? If--
Right.
Because I was there on on graveyard, if I couldn't fix it, then it was three hours to get somebody in there at two o'clock in the morning to fix it. So it really taught me to be self reliant, and to work with what you had. I think that's a big part of what got so exciting about what I do now is that, you know, how do we make all these things work together? How do we how do we solve these problems? I spent my whole growing up career solving problems, when it's $1,000 a minute when the line breaks, and there's 30 people standing around. There's a lot of pressure. So it's the same thing now, right? We're spending millions of dollars in electricity. How do we solve that problem? How do we how do we reduce that greenhouse gas and that kind of stuff. So it's just fun.
Now, that's great. I, you know, I have a former career in software. And a lot of the systems I would build with would if they broke, the business went down. So I at least know, it's not it wasn't a production line in the physical sense. But I at least know the stress and the learning that occurs very quickly when you have to put yourself in that situation.
Yeah.
Well, tell us a little bit about your job now. So this year, you obviously have enjoyed this switch. But tell us a little more about what you're doing at Dominguez Hills.
You know, it's funny, when I, when I started working here, the director of facilities said "Your job is to make sure that I don't get as many hot and cold calls, people are comfortable, and that your employees get paid." And I said, "Yeah, but I'm the Energy Manager also, right?" So I want you to just focus on that. Focusing on making sure that everybody's comfortable, hot and cold at the right temperature just leads into energy management, right? Because we have systems that aren't working correctly. When we fix them we save energy, you know, I mean, it's really simple, right? You know, I was faking it for the first forever. You know, we all think that, you know, are they gonna wake up one day and say this guy doesn't know what he's doing? But obviously, I think I've done I think I've done a pretty good job, you know, but when I first started, they were doing a MBCx monitoring based commissioning project and it had been going on for like five years. They handed me this punch list, six pages, this Excel document with six pages of things to fix. And I looked at it, I'm like, "Oh, my God, what do I do with this?" And I asked the director, I said, "Okay, so what do you want to do with this?" He goes, "Fix it. Go." "So, so this thing that says, 'thermostat behind the coffee pot,' I could just move it?" "Yeah." "This thing that says, 'valve doesn't open and close, there's a pair of vice grips on it.' Can I buy a new valve and an actuator?" He goes, "Yeah." "This, this, this economizer that's stuck, you're saying that if I just unstick it and put a new controller--" and he goes "Yeah." I go, "Alright, it doesn't, that's not rocket science, right?" So I went through and I just fixed all these things. And the building saved $100,000, you know, in rebate money the first year. And I'm just like, "Huh, this isn't that hard." And in fact, it's kind of cool, right? Because now you see all these components that make up, what does it take to keep a building comfortable. And then it just kind of advanced from there. So that's how I got into it and started getting excited about it, was was that first punch list.
That's funny, I, I often will say that people just don't really care about energy or think about energy. And it's not that they don't care, it's just that it's not something that they just take it for granted until it's broken. But it sounds like you got to go in and basically get rid of a bunch of niggling problems people didn't really notice all at the same time.
Well, that, you know, the thing that's hard about and are my peers, and, you know, Chief engineers and stuff is that, honestly, if nobody's complaining, there's not a problem. And I don't mean that there's not a problem, it's just that we have so many other things that we have to deal with.
Right.
And, and so if nobody complains about it, good chance it's gonna stay like that for a while, you know, so until you, you know, really start looking at it from--and that's where that energy efficiency side, it gets you in there to fix all those problems. And then you realize, "Oh, my God, you know, what, there's not really half as many calls." Chief Engineer, or the Director of Facilities is like, "Wow, Ken. I used to get complaints all the time." And when they get to that level, that's pretty bad. You know? And he's like, "They've gone down, you know, exponentially."
Right.
Okay. So that's how you can tell I'm doing my job. And the utility bill is getting better and better. You know, we save more money every year, so.
Yeah, well, how did how did you go from that? I mean, fixing thermostats over coffee pots is one thing. I mean, that's it's, you know, actually harder than it seems sometimes just to get people to, to track it down and actually get somebody in there to fix it and have a process by which it gets fixed. I don't mean to under undercut the difficulty of that. But when you've done all that stuff, then you've done a lot more than that, I know now. How did you move to kind of phase two?
So I think phase two was, you know, it was it was exciting, right to see these results, right? And then, but but even in the early days, we really couldn't see them the way we wanted to. So then we started getting into metering, right? So that was the next big thing. And when I first started doing metering on these buildings, I didn't realize that everybody thought, "Oh, you just put one meter on the building. And that's great." Well, the problem is with these older buildings, every transformer needs a meter. And I've got buildings that have four transformers, right? So all of a sudden, instead of this $1,000 meter, it's $4,000. And instead of just okay, this weekend, we're gonna do this. But I just took it one step at a time, you know, and I think a lot of that even going back to Hostess, right, it's like, what can I do to fix this problem right now, instead of waiting? I can't wait, right? And so--
Right.
it's the same thing, right? So instead of waiting for somebody to give me a million dollars to put meters on all these buildings, I said, "Wait, I can put one meter on now and see a fourth of the building." And so every month, if I had money left over on my credit card, I bought another meter, and I want to have three or four meters stacked up, then I scheduled time with electricians, "Hey, let's install these meters." And I spent a couple years doing that, right? And so all of a sudden, now I have electric meters on all these buildings, and then we can start really seeing, you know, some cool stuff. With the CSU we have a working group, all the energy managers. There's 23 CSU's, and we used to before COVID, meet in person, you know, a couple times a year. You know, now we have our monthly phone calls, but we share ideas. And for me, it became competitive because when I first got into the system, there was some really great guys, you know, at Long Beach and Fullerton and Northridge and, and I was like, "I want to, I want to be a rock star. You know? I want to do that, right?" So I'm, I'm listening to what they're doing, you know, we're talking about lighting and stuff. And back then it was still fluorescent, nobody could afford LEDs in 2013 or so. And then things just start coming across your desk, you know, you know, I learned about this great control software in lighting, right? And I'm like, "Hey, let me try that out." Oh, that's too expensive. I'm like, "I'm just gonna do one classroom." You know, I'm just gonna do five offices, and and that grew and and I worked with them. And then it was something else you know, and then it was get involved with the US Green Building Council and there's these projects. I make connections with my local utilities, Southern California Edison and worked with their emerging tech. And it's like, "Hey, we want to do, have you ever heard of these Belimo smart energy valves?" And I'm like, "Actually, yeah, you know, I did hear about them." "Well, we'd like to put in six of them and test them. Like, "Hey, I'm the guy, right?" So I don't know that it was like this, this plan, as as much as it is, the more you do, it's karma. Right? You know, it's, it's, you start doing these good things, people start hearing about them, you start hearing about more If you look at my LinkedIn presence, I try and share the things I'm doing. And that helps people to reach out and I find new stuff.
So it really wasn't phase one and two. It was more like one thing to the next, one fix to the next.
I wish it was phase one and two, because then it would be an eight hour day, I think, right? You know, we're working--
Right. I like it.
Right.
Work on this. Instead, it's like, if I see something that looks, so the tagline on my email is if, if better is possible, good is not enough. Right?
And and so I look at things like that. I'm like, I'm always like, okay, yeah, it's good. But you know, if we did this, it'd be better. Right?
We did an energy managers meeting, and there was this, this, I remember, this young kid came out to talk, they would have guest speakers sometimes. And, you know, back then the company was EcoVox. And they had this analytics software from SkySpark. And they're like, "Hey, we can do this and this and this." And I'm like, you know, and ask them a couple questions. I'm like, "Okay, well, who owns the data?" "You do." "Yeah. But what happens if, you know, we get divorced, right? You know, and your company doesn't work?" He's like, "Well, you could host it on your site. It's open source SkySpark. And I could give you the name of three other companies right now that program in SkySpark, if you didn't want to do it yourself." Why would you not test that out? Right? It's like, there's no risk, the money is minimum at that time. And turns out that, you know, they went from that to site logic to everybody's using them now. And it's like, so it's reaching out and finding people when they're young and new and entrepreneurs and that kind of stuff is really exciting also to me, because I love to solve problems. And in the early stages, there's lots of problems, right? But we have our own problems. And if we can steer that technology to fix my problems, and everybody else's, I forget what the question was, but that's where I'm going, you know.
Right.
What, no, I was just saying, you didn't really go from like, you know, phase one, fix all the easy coffeemaker, thermostat problems, and phase two, meter every building, and it was more of an organic process, it sounds like.
Yeah, I think I went from like, year two of my career here to like, the next seven years haven't stopped, right? They're just like, just exploded, right? It's just, there's always something new.
So one of the questions I'd have, though, you know, this comes back from more of my software days, because I think that describes a lot of what we did in the software world, which was, you know, you'd build something and then you'd add on features to it. And then before you knew it, you had this Frankenstein system that nobody could really run anywhere, because it was like all this stuff kludged together. How do you avoid that kind of situation? Because I mean, you're talking about physical systems even so it's even probably worse, you know, and, or that the implications of it being thrown together like that can be more dangerous, or dangerous or damaging or--
Right.
But anyway, go ahead.
I don't know that it's that big of a deal, really, right? Because if we if we, we take intelligent risks, right? We look so let's talk about the, like the enlighted right. So the first thing I get asked was, I actually got told it's better to die with the herd than to die alone. Right? When I was testing this stuff, right?
Right.
Right. And I'm like, "Well, look--"
Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM, I think is the expression that I used to hear all the time. Yeah.
Yeah. Different curve. Yeah, exactly. Right. So so I'm like, "Well, okay, so here's the worst case scenario, right? I'm only going to do 10 of them. And if they don't work, I unplugged it and the lights work, just like they always did, except for I'll have new fixtures in there, you know." And so there was no risk.
Right.
And as we develop that out, it gets better and better, it works by itself. Software, if it works correctly, you don't need somebody except for when somebody changes out hardware, then your software stops working, right? But in general, it kind of works.
Right.
We put systems in that, you know, we have redundant backups. So even if the software fails, it's like I call IT and say, "Hey, can you load up yesterday's backup?" Right? And things go back to where they were. And then once once that's working correctly, so okay, what's the next step? Well, let's link that to the building automation system. Right? Well, my building automation system is solid. It's just a point that I'm bringing into it. It works or it doesn't work, you know. So once it once we take the time to make it work correctly, I don't do anything anymore, right? So my goal is to design a system so that when I leave, it still runs. Right? I get so tired of people saying, "Well, yeah, but Ken, what happens when you're gone?"
Right.
When I'm gone, it's still gonna be running, you know. We have a four megawatt hour stem battery storage system here, designed for peak demand shaving. I do nothing. Right? The system is in place. It's it's on the main infrastructure. When there's an event or when you know, it sees my electric bill start going up, the thing automatically works, whether I'm here or not, right? Later, I'm going to add more batteries.
Right.
The other batteries, maybe they'll take some more tinkering and stuff, but I'll still have that one big system that's gonna just work. We put in the Belimo smart energy valves, right? Once you get them programmed correctly, they're just a piece of hardware, just like we had before. Old school people, mechanical was good, you know? But once you take the time to prove it and make it work correctly, there's not a lot of work left over after that. That's the whole idea of, of creating this new stuff--
Is to automate it, so that we can go spend time on fixing the stuck dampers that no matter, you know, how many times we go over there and fix them, it's like, in two years, it's like, how come the dampers don't work anymore, you know? No amount of technology is going to fix that for us, you know?
Right.
Right. Right. So you're yeah, but I like that. So you're, you're basically making little modules of functionality, like, you know, back to my software analogy. I mean, that's kind of how we would do it, too. There were pieces like the login screen: we built that five years ago, and it's still the same login screen. It hasn't had to change, because it doesn't need to do anything other than log you in. And that's that hasn't changed at all right?
Correct. Correct. So we make sure that the module works correctly. And then it's just finding that that link that links it to the next piece of software, or in our sense, the next piece of hardware, right? You know--
Right.
Only now we're getting to the point where it's really software and hardware, right? So how do we connect those two?
Well, as you think of your peers, do you, how many of them do you think are operating that way? Like, so it sounds like your job then is the innovation of like getting the new next piece of the next widget or collection of technologies to work together versus hand holding the system that, you know, maybe it'd be held together with baling twine and bubble gum or something like that?
I want to think that they're all trying to do that. Right? You know, I have to believe that right? But I think it's hard, because a lot of them are just Energy Managers. Right? So if you're just an Energy Manager, it's hard for you to look at how that stuff integrates, because you have to work with the plant guy then right? Or the trades and stuff like that. And so you got to form that that link. I think that most of us are looking for that that magic bullet. Okay, why I don't put in this lighting stuff, and I'm gonna take care of that. From an energy side, I think a lot of them look at it just from the the lighting side, and not from the whole building side. And I think that that's where, where we need to get better as a system, right? We need to be able to holistically look at it, instead of you know that that one piece. Well, you know, they tell me if I put this piece in, then it saves where? Let's call it a Belimo energy valve, right? it's gonna save me energy, because I'm gonna use water, blah, blah, blah. And the energy guy sees that, but he has to sell that to the chief engineer. But he doesn't know all the pieces. So if they're working separately, it's complicated. Whereas realistic it'd be if he told the chief engineer, "Yeah, but if you put this valve, then it's going to cost the same as a competitor valve, but it's going to tell you what the GPM is all the time on your air handler. So when you start to go troubleshooting, you're like, "The air handler doesn't work, but the system says the valve's open." You actually know that there's water or not water flowing through that. And that's how it was with, you know, all the older stuff. And so there's, there's this connection that has to be that we have to create, so that my peers can do their job better, I think. And and I'm not saying all my peers, right? You know? There's a lot of us doing great stuff. The CSU is a really exciting place. We share that. But the the sustainability, the energy, and the plant have to be a marriage, right? They all need to be connected, because because they all have that thing that they're really good at. But you know, just like a--
Right.
--good marriage, right? You have a happy marriage if you're both really good at things. And you combine those efforts, right? So it's the the symbiotic relationship, right? Everything is getting better instead of just this section.
Right.
What are the strengths of the different individuals? What do they bring to the party? And are they all working towards that same goal, right? Which is where where we all need to be going right? How do we reduce greenhouse gas?
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I and you can tell in that the way I frame the question, I've run into a lot of people that seem to kind of not make those connections. I mean, often I'll meet people that are focused on making the buildings work, you know, making sure they're reliable, but they don't really care about the energy. The energy is a means to making sure they don't get cold and hot calls, right? Like, they'll just turn the fan up, or, you know, turn the thermostat up more down or whatever. So having that connection between those two things is I guess I hadn't really fully appreciated, most energy managers are not necessarily engineers.
Right.
I mean, not necessarily. It depends on the on the organization, how they're structured, and how that's all fits together. That's great. Well, let's maybe let's talk about some of the specific systems. So in your intro, you basically talked about the fact that you were given authority to go fix stuff, which I think is great. I mean, that's like if you don't have that you're kind of stuck, right?
Well, and that's and that's the beauty of being the chief engineer, right? Because if I was just the Energy Manager, limited budget, no manpower, how do I go and fix this stuff? But as the chief engineer, it's like, you know, I have a half a dozen guys to a dozen guys working for me. I'm like, hey, "Fix that, you know. And here's the budget to fix it." Anyway--
Well, it sounds like your motivation largely is to literally fix it, not to save energy. Like the saving energy is a second. It's not that it's not important, but that's not really the primary thing you're doing. You're actually trying to get the building to work, just in general.
In the, in the beginning, yes. It was so funny. I spoke to the Dean of whatever--he was our sustainability committee. And, and I went and told him one day, I said, "Look, you know, what, I don't get this sustainability stuff. I'm not really into that. I'm into saving money." Right? Not realizing that early on that, you know, if you save money, you're into sustainability, right? Because if if you look, if you do it correctly, it's that that whole thing, and that's, yeah. Let's let's fix the problem and save the environment at the same time.
Right.
Those are solutions that we're looking for.
No that's great. Well, let's, let's talk about some of the more advanced systems. So you did mention you doing a lot of metering like of your campus. How much how much of your campus now is metered at what level? Just talk to me a little bit about how that system works and how do you operationally use it? Like, what are you looking at reports every day? Or--just tell me about that.
No, I wish that that's all I had to do is look at reports every day, haha. But no. So every single building on my campus now--with the exception of, I think, two--have electric meter data. I'm working on bringing the water meter data in next. I've got a couple buildings. I've done gas meter for all the buildings. And you know, my goal is to stop burning gas. So we'll see how that that's, we'll talk about that a little later. So--
Okay.
Every every building has an electric meter. That electric meter is brought into, we're a Metasys JCI campus here. So all that data is brought into that. From there, every single trend that we do goes into the EcoVox SkySpark platform. And then we're able to do trend analysis and look at the stuff. The biggest thing that I use it for is proof that I'm doing the right thing, that we've done the right direction. And the second is it helps me to do more pilot projects, if you know. It sounds kind of funny, but it's like, I have this great data, why don't you bring your new emerging technology here. Let's test it out. I'll give you access to the data; you can see what's going on. And there's complete transparency in how we're doing this. So that's, that's what I use.
Right.
I use it as much for that as I use it for troubleshooting, realistically.
Interesting. Okay, so yeah, you're like the, the tracks in Michigan where they try out the new cars or something like that for, your campus becomes that for the for the privates.
That's my hope. Yeah, exactly.
Huh. Okay.
And then let's look at technology, then that is, you know, how can we test out this and not risk shutting the campus down?
Right.
That's a whole nother side of it. But but I don't think that's as scary as people think realistically, right? Because, you know, if you think about the software, even from your your world, right? If you wanted to try out some new thing, what, you wouldn't overlay the entire medical hospitals software. You would take one module that was offline on a private computer, and you do that. Okay, well, campuses or high rise buildings have so many of these smaller systems. Okay, well, I'm gonna do one classroom. I'm gonna do one office, you know? I'm gonna make these adjustments that I can push a button that they go away. And so the risk is very minimal for this new stuff.
You often will hear about how universities are like, the place where new ideas come and and they're so innovative, and all these things. But in practice--at least, in my work as a consultant--they're some of the stodgiest, risk averse kind of, you know, old school. I mean they, organizations that have been around for hundreds of years and will likely be around for 100 years, because they move very slowly. So it's, that's a good point, like, you're able to do this down at the module kind of level or at the building component level, rather than, yeah, changing the whole system. But over time, that stuff adds up.
Yeah, it adds up and then it, you know, it proves concept and it and it, you know, let's let's do something bigger. Good track record and, and you just keep going. And I understand that I'm lucky that I'm at a small medium size campus, one of the very large research institution hospital campuses, you know. There's a lot more rules in place that they have to deal with, but I still think there's things that they even can do at a smaller level to help you know, promote this stuff. And and they do it but maybe they just aren't they don't talk about as much.
Right. Yeah, you have you probably have a little more leeway because you're not, people aren't on ventilators or if biological research going on that could kill people if it's if the energy goes off, right? Yeah.
Exactly, you know, destroyed 20 years of somebody's research or something like that, yeah.
Exactly. Yeah, no that's interesting. Well, okay, so we got metering. We've got--what else? Sounds like lighting? Are you pretty much through your lighting projects with--tell me more.
So yeah, so first, we did meter and then we got into lighting. I played with different stuff. I've chosen Lighted to use at this campus. And I'm not saying that's for everybody, but it worked here. I did, the first time I tested it I did four sensors in the hallway outside of IT. Right? That was that was how I prove concept, right? If IT is okay with it, if it's outside. And then so that that expanded to classroom remodels. You know, we did four classroom remodels over the summer. Okay, let's put it in there and try it out. And then that went to okay, well, let's do all this exterior stuff around this building. And then alright hey, let's do a whole building. Wow, this went really good. Let's do another whole building. So it was great because not only did we turn down the lights and save a ton of energy, but then we were able to finally, this year, tie it into our building automation system. And now we don't have to cool spaces that don't have people because now we know that there's no people in there. So we're able to change our ventilation rates and do all that. So lighting was probably the next biggest thing that that I really got into that was exciting.
So but let me stop you there. So you're saying that because the lighting occupancy sensors existed, then you could use it for other systems? So it wasn't really just lighting. It was like lighting, but--
Correct.
Smart, smart building technologies.
Yeah yeah. So I probably started playing with the controls before I started playing with the lighting, right? Because LED was too expensive when I first started playing with it. And I was an early adopter on the controls. As the controls got better and LED got more affordable as we expanded, it just kind of worked together, right? And then the controls, as they got better and better, then the next step was it it--because for the first five years I didn't tie it into the building automation system. It wasn't until they were ready so that we could do something with the back net to polish a building automation system. And even then it didn't work on some of the buildings I did because those buildings were pneumatic. They weren't even DDC or digital, right? We couldn't control them. But I like to think that I, you know, I chose a product that I, I saw the future, right? I saw that, well, eventually, these pneumatic controls are gonna be replaced, and I'm gonna be able to gain control of this stuff. Eventually, I'm gonna want to control the ventilation and I need something--you know, why would I want to put in another occupancy sensor if I already have that built into this one?
Right.
And so I looked at that product as okay, well, let's look at it five years out, right? Not just today. And, and it was a gamble. Right? You know, I had to hope that that company would stick around that long. And I got lucky. So--
I guess I hadn't really thought about this before. But I mean, I've done a lot of modeling on lighting projects. And, you know, adding controls is another way to try to get the payback to make sense. With LEDs it's hard because they don't use very much energy. So turning them off doesn't save you as much energy as turning off a crappier light bulb. When, so the controls kind of got value engineered out of a lot of projects because of that. But what you're saying is, they're not really for the lights; they're for the the rest of the building. So that's yeah. Anyway, that's a takeaway for myself that I might log away here.
And I've got some really awesome graphs that show it, you know, just the the where's the kW, kWh before the lighting, and then with the lighting, and then the controls got tuned, and it dropped down, and then they got brought into the building automation system had dropped down even farther. And then it was six months later that I I had another issue where, you know, we had that override. So in case talk about what's the risk, right? Well, the risk is what if it stops working. So we had a switch built into the building automation system that would just disable all of that. And so if we disabled all the the control section, then everything went to fully occupied. And that got flipped, and I couldn't figure out, well I saw in the graphs. Now, my chilled water usage went up. Because if all those buildings are occupied now, or the one building that we were, you know, demoing it at, everything, all of a sudden, everything went up. Well, my chilled water doubled to the air handler. Okay, so now multiply that times all the buildings. So it's, it's so many things, you look at it just from a kWh, but it actually all those these little things that we do, come back to the, to the central plant, to the air handler to, you know, and that's was where the Belimo Smart Energy valves, because now I actually had a GPM meter on every single air handler. I was able to pull that graph in and say, "Wow, you know, what, when the building was six people per floor, and my Enlighted was talking to my building automation system, and I had all those zones shut, I was doing 20 GPM to the to the air handler coil. And when we accidentally flipped that switch to occupied, I went to 40 GPM.
Wow.
Right? And so how much more of a load, how many tons is that coming off of the central plant?
A lot more than your LED lights, that's for sure. Right? Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. So it's not just that I was able to, you know, yeah, the LED lights were easy. The other thing, I mean, not to get into the whole control thing only, but we changed out fluorescent bulbs, put in LED bulbs, and 70% of them are at 40% or less when we got done. If you don't put controls on there, it's hard to adjust the lights to the individual users. So now we've you know, people are happier because we can turn their lights down to what they want.
Right?
So so that's the whole lighting thing, right? So--
It's more about wedding quality than it is about the energy, right? In that case you're again fixing it as the engineer not not just saving energy as the Energy Manager.
Yeah, yeah exactly. So all right. We did, we did the metering; we did the lighting; we did a four megawatt hour stem battery storage system. It was done through LCR: local capacitor reserve. So, again, I'm working with my utility rep, working with different vendors, looking at different things. Batteries are the next evolution, right? If you think about, you know, the entire city, whatever city you're in listening to this, everybody has solar on top of their roofs. And we have all this free electricity. And all of a sudden, there's some crazy storm out of Alaska that blows all these clouds over us and all the solar production goes to 20%. Okay, well, where's that power come from? Right. So that's where the batteries I think are so important, instead of having, you know, coal plants, or peaker plants having a fire up or having to sit on standby all the time so that we can do that. And so batteries were the next thing for us. Let me step back so you're, let's gonna talk about a little bit who I am right? So we started playing with batteries and solar, we started putting solar panels on our golf carts. Because, again, you know, we're playing with this, practice what you preach, walk the walk, talk to talk, you know. I, I my first solar system on my house was a kit, a plug and play system from Amazon, that I put on my own house, right? And then Jeff Mauro, the guy that works for me, supervising building service engineer, he's like, "Wow, Ken! It's really that easy?" Yep. And we redesigned it and did a better system for his house, you know? So then we're like, "Well, look, it's that simple: solar panel, a battery, you know." So then we took a golf cart and said, "Hey, what if we put a 300 watt solar panel on this golf cart? The golf cart doesn't have to be plugged in anymore." You know?
Right.
So then it's like, "Wow, the solar panels have batteries." Alright, so then, as I'm, you know, not that I wasn't, but you know, we're talking to battery people and that kind of stuff and it's like, "Oh, I know, I get it. I really get it." We were probably, three years ago, one of the largest battery storage behind the meters that wasn't commercial, you know?
What's your peak load on a, on a daily basis? Just what's what is four megawatt hours mean for your campus? Like how much electricity does the campus use?
So, yeah so it's funny. So four megawatt hours actually means, because of what my load curve looks like, it means I can shave about 300 kW off of my peak--
Okay.
--throughout the day. It means that realistically, I could do a whole megawatt for four hours, right? If I turn the--
--battery on full blast, so from four to eight o'clock, you know peak time four to nine, so from four to eight, I could reduce if I was doing two megawatts total, I could go down to one megawatt for four hours.
Right.
Okay, and is that a pretty normal peak for you guys on a regular day? Like, maybe--
Yeah, we're, you know, before COVID, we were, we were 3.5 maybe, and the battery kept me at, you know 3.3, something like that, right? Now, now COVID, the batteries got me down at like 1.3. And I'm like, I'm 1.5 1.6, before the battery, we're just, you know, turning things down, and, you know, not cooling the spaces where people are at, not at. That kind of stuff, right? And, you know, it's, it's about $60,000-80,000 a year savings is what we're doing because of the battery, because peak demand charges are so high. So, you know, if you look at like $17 a kW times 300,000, that's a good little amount--3 or 300 kW. The battery was, you know, kind of the next step. It's doing wonderful. I guess the the Belimo smart vowels were kind of another thing that that we once we saw all of the benefits, not just pressure independent, you know, set the delta t to what you want, but hey, look, I really can see what's going on in this building. We just finished installing the last one about a month ago. We're working on on the commissioning and getting them all brought in and talking correctly. Once that's done, we're gonna actually control the secondary pump that pumps the chilled water throughout the campus, instead of adjusting pressure, or delta p, we're gonna adjust that based off of open valve position, right? So now that I know that let's say that valve is calling for 75 GPM and it's getting 75 GPM and the valve position is at 40%. Hey, I'm pumping too much water, right? So I can start slowing the pump down and saving more energy on the on the secondary pump. A lot of people run things because that's the way they've always run and we don't get any complaints. I'm finding that out. I started tweaking things for demand response. And I found out that, you know, we run 14 dP--differential pressure--on the secondary pump. That's about where it runs. And when there's an event, I turn it down to like 12. And everybody's still cool. And I started one night, just start turning that down, down, down and I got it down to like 6 dP. And the spaces that needed to be cooled at nighttime were still cooled. You know, the police station,
Yeah.
a couple of server rooms. Yet yet the controls were set up so that the minimum it would ever run is 12. Right? Because people just, that's the way it works and no complaints. And so--
Right.
There's, it's those little things, you know, that we start, as we start having the the visibility because of the controls, or because of the metering, because of the valves correctly, we can start seeing that, hey, we're doing way more than we need to. We can turn these down. We can turn these lights down. We can turn these pumps down. We can turn these temperatures down.
Right. I was talking to somebody who is an Energy Manager at a campus, and they were talking about how they used to just, like pre cool their chilled water loop, like in the morning, when they knew they were gonna have a hot day. And they would just get it super cold because they didn't have an energy storage tank. And but they knew that if they did that, that they wouldn't have complaints during the day.
Right.
But it's but what it sounds like you're doing is, you know, it's rather than thinking the whole system and just like overpowering the whole thing, you're having much more granular control along the way. So you can see where you can make those adjustments. And I think that's, again, making it work better, which is awesome.
Right. Instead of doing his entire loop, if he had the controls on the buildings, he could, you know, not every building has the same thermal mass as the one next to it, right? So it could be that instead of pre cooling his entire loop, it's just like, you know, I know that I have, you know, the one or two buildings that are a problem now, and I'm going to pre cool those buildings, not the entire plan, not the entire campus. And, and that--
Right.
--kind of gets to let's design to the 90% and not the 10%. And, and pre cooling the loop for the whole campus is because we have the 10% issues, right? Yeah. So we should be designing to the 90% and then customize to the 10%. And we can talk about that more. I really think that's really important that people grasp, especially when controlling buildings for lighting, temperature, starting up, all that stuff, right? Yeah, there's there's that south facing, southwest office that has all windows that I can't do a five or six or eight degrees setback, because as soon as the cooling shuts down, his office gets 15 degrees warmer. Right?
Right.
But I can adjust his office differently, right? As opposed to all the interior spaces that, they recover just like that, as my system is working correctly. And so I'm going to adjust those spaces, and then I'm going to customize the five or six or, you know, 10% that, that need that more. And that's how we're gonna get better energy efficiency.
Yeah, like your lighting, you said earlier, if you have the controls on the lights, then you can actually set the light to the level that the people want it.
Right.
You know, rather than just like turning the lights off on the entire floor or something like that. You just have much more granular control. All right, well, okay, so we've been through metering; we've been through lighting; we've been through the cooling system; been through the storage, battery storage, which is great. You mentioned trying to get off gas. So tell me more about what you're doing there. Because that's obviously the holy grail of, of at least the work I'm working on with decarbonization planning.
It's, yeah, I I really do, I hope that it is the Holy Grail. So, so we've been working with a company, Solar America Solutions. They have a vacuum tube solar thermal system that is supposed to be, you know, four times better than what else is out there. And so we're right now piloting their product. We've put 315 panels up on the roof. And we're going through the commissioning stage now trying to get the flow just right, and all that stuff. You know, they've they've got this product in one spot in Indiana where they, they've got a bigger system, and they're, they're first going through a heat exchanger for an air handler. And then from there it goes to a domestic hot water loop. And then from there it goes to a swimming pool, right? And so they're heating all this stuff with just just the sun. And so if we make this work the way that they say it does, and that we hope that it works, I don't need boilers anymore, right? Because we can get everything from the sun. Put put a few--a few? 150 of these--but you know, we put a few of these, we have to find the real estate for it, but and then we just dump it right into the hot water loop. Now that takes care of the daytime stuff. So if we size the system correctly, my next step--because to me, it's all about marrying two different technologies, right? So there's another company we've been looking at called Novacab that has this stuff called phase change. Think thermal energy storage, right? You know, instead of a big hot water tank or a or a ice water tank or ice, they have their special recipe phase change material that we can design it for hot water or for chilled water. I think that right now we should be putting all our efforts into hot water because I don't care if I shift my energy load, I need to just stop burning gas. That's going to be the biggest bang for all of us on greenhouse gas. And so instead of putting this million or 2 million gallon tank up on the hill next to the campus that I don't have the real estate, it comes in like three foot by four foot by four foot pods that I could modular put together. And we're lucky that we have a tunnel system here at my campus. I want to line the tunnel with this phase change technology. Take the solar thermal, charge up to phase change. At nighttime the phase change continues and keeps my loop warm. And in a perfect world, I design the system big enough for the wintertime. And then in the summertime, I take that excess heat that I'm storing and I run a Rankine generator--hot water generator--right, that creates electricity. That would be the holy grail that would continue that whole loop. I'm gonna find out.
So yeah, okay, so let me set it back. So the first of all, the phase change material, I I guess what I've heard about phase change material is usually been designed inside the building space directly, if like beams and cooling beams.
So that's, that's one style, right?
Okay.
So they have this phase change material that you put like in the attic, or the ceiling, right? So it absorbs the heat, doesn't let anything come through. There is another stuff where it actually is just--think about the big cube of jello, right? That you could charge it up with hot water. And then it absorbs all that heat and just stores it there. And then when you're needed, when it's needed, you run your cooler water back to it and take that heat back out of it. So it's, it's kind of like ice.
Okay, so it's it's essentially like like ground source heating, but you're not drilling into the earth. You're just running it through this--
Well--
--jello like material that--or does it actually go from like liquid to gas, or like when you get it what--tell me about the physics.
And I'm not an expert on this, but it kind of goes from a solid to a liquid.
Okay.
Right? So as it absorbs all that heat, as it goes away, it changes state again. Same thing, whether you do it for chilled water--and it's a different recipe, if it's chilled water, or if it's hot water, you know? You design it for the temperature that you want to run. If I want to run 160 degree water to the campus, then I would have it designed at, you know, 160. I charge it up. 180: add all the heat into it and then take the heat out just by running the water across it. The beauty of this is--if it works--is that there's no moving parts.
Right.
So the solar thermal, all I got to do is pump water up to the tank and a heat exchanger. The phase change, all I got to do is pump water through it. And if I line the tunnels and put it, you know, I have all my hot water and chilled water lines throughout the tunnel, then I don't even think I need extra pumps because I'll just use the main secondary pump and just, just divert the water when I need it through through it. So you'll have some Belimo valves, right, that are opening and closing, that are letting the--to to control the temperature.
Interesting.
And so there's, you don't have that thermal problem that you have with, you know--
Stratification in the tanks or whatever. Yeah.
Exactly right. I don't, I don't have to create a false load. Because if I bring my temperature back at the wrong temperature, then I you know, I lose all that. So I'm wasting energy. So low delta t problems go away, whether it's hot water or chilled water. And so, you know, it gives us a lot more flexibility on what the temperatures that we run our campuses and our loops at.
So, but it sounds like though, this is a good solution for, given your climate, given the fact that you guys are not on steam. You're on hot water. Right?
Correct.
Yeah. Because if you're in steam, this wouldn't work.
Yeah, we used to be steam years ago.
Okay, so you still have the steam tunnels is and that's that's where a lot of this--
Yeah.
--would go?
Yeah.
Okay. Interesting. Okay, that's good. This gives me some good ideas. And then you're saying in the summertime, you'll have too much heat so you, you can use it to run--that's where the Rankine generator would come in?
Yeah, that's, that's the hope. Right? And I've done a little bit of research. I know it's new. And, you know, obviously, hopefully, I'd find funding for some grant, you know, some CEC grant or DOE grant or something like that to help pay for this kind of stuff. Because it's not free.
Right.
But we got to--somebody has to be up. And so I'd love to be the first guy, you know, so let's try it out. Yeah.
Yeah. That's interesting.
Again, what's, what's the worst case, you know? It doesn't work, and I still have my boilers as backup. And but I'm not, I'm not going to do this until I've done you know, we're doing 15 to 20 of these solar thermals before I do 150 of them, right?
Right.
We're gonna make sure that the numbers are correct. And the same thing, you know, we'll do two of these pods for this, for the phase change, and make sure that we get the right BTU content in and out of them--like they promise--before I buy 60 of them.
Yeah, what's just a couple, like, how efficient are they? I mean, like you put in heat in some of it's not gonna come back out. But how much do they--do you have numbers on that?
I don't remember. Yeah. I don't remember what the numbers were.
But it's in like high 80s or the 90s. That type of range?
Yeah. Because there's nowhere for it to, there's nowhere for it to go, right? So it's sealed up in this container. It doesn't leak the heat out. So, and if we're making it from the sun, then you know, we can afford some losses. But I don't, from what I remember, the numbers are pretty high.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
Interesting. Ah, well, that's, that, that's exciting. So it sounds like you've got your basics in place. You've got your metering. You've got, you've done your lighting. You've got a bunch of different controls and improving all the time. This phase change material that we just talked through seems like pretty promising stuff you're already testing out. What's next, what's next on the design board that you haven't really implemented yet, but that's on your list?
So one of the things that I'd really like to do that I've reached out to a couple people and I'm trying to figure out is the whole vehicle to grid. Only for us it would be with the golf carts, right? So we've done the solar panels on top of the golf carts. We've proven that you know, I've got golf carts that are eight years old, with the same set of batteries in them and nobody plugs them in. And so, so that's great, right? But that means that batteries charged up when I have a 300 watt solar panel up there just wasted. If, if you count up how many golf carts a large university and all these places have, you know, it could be 20, 50, 100 golf carts, and if every one of them had a 300 watt solar panel, now instead of just parking it wherever, at the end of the day if the person plugged it in just like they would have done before the solar panel, and we put a bidirectional charge controller on that. So now, once the batteries are full, that 300 gets into the grid and we reduce. And if we put a communication--some kind of Zigbee or Wi Fi or something--in that controller, then at four o'clock, or the next time we have to worry about brownouts, hey, look, I got 50 golf carts that all have X kW on them. I could reduce for an hour and help with the peak. You know, that's something that I'd really like to see happen. I know we're starting to talk about it with the Teslas and the Leafs and all the cars and stuff but. But as universities, we should be pushing this, and I don't think it's that complicated. Somebody just needs to, let's get that bidirectional charge controller at a smaller level.
Hmm. Okay. So yeah, basically, you have like little mini generators moving around your campus?
Well that's exactly what--so, so when I built the first two, people say, "Well, who designed it?" Well, it was the team of Kenny, Jeff, and Amazon or eBay, right? You know, we're like, "Whoa, what, what's available?" Right? So after we saw how great the golf cart was, and that we have solar power and it stays charged up all by itself, not plugged in. We then bought a 1500 watt inverter, put it in a plastic caterpillar toolbox, put some jumper cables on it, cut out some air holes in the plastic box, cut out a spot for a 110 outlet, wired this thing all up, and now when we go to events and stuff, lift the seat up, hook up the jumper cables, and now I can run the popcorn machine and the slurpee and, you know, we have a farmers market. And sometimes instead of having them run gas generators for the cappuccino machine, we're like, hey, let's just use our golf cart.
Yeah.
Right? And so that's the niche, that kind of cool stuff. But at the same time, if there was a real emergency, I've got a 36 volt generator, and I've got a 48 volt generator that does 110 volts. I could plug it in and run your EHOS, your Emergency Response Center. And if those batteries ran down, even the other golf carts that don't have solar panels, if they were charged up before the event. Okay, bring in another one, hook up the jumper cables. The one that we use for actual farmers market, we didn't like the jumper cables. So we just used, you know, forklift, you know, big plug so that I don't have interns that are you know, hooking up jumper cables, right? So we just put a plug on it, like, you know how you charge up your forklift, and take the toolbox out there, open up the lid, pull the cables out, plug it in. Away you go.
No, that's great. I love it. I would have a couple of questions, though. How did you get around some of the safety concerns? I know you're dealing with electricity and students and seems like there's some potential issues there.
Yeah I, you know, there's, there's, there's a couple issues, you know, but I think to push this technology, we need to start doing this kind of stuff. Right? And, and--
Yeah.
Everything's sealed up. It's got a plug. It's safe. And those are the things that we learn, right? We first did it for central plant, where we're all educated. And then it's like, okay, what's the next step? You know?
Yeah, yeah yeah.
We bought used lithium balanced batteries, and we built a netzero center for student outreach and stuff here, right, where we took this picnic area that had a lid on it already, put some solar panels on it, put a cabinet in the back with some used batteries. And now we have a big screen and some ceiling fans and an eGauge. And you know, everybody can, you can plug your laptop in and see what the energy uses is. Right? All the, all the plugs are--
Right.
You know, things that, that start to educate other people. So even though I'm the Chief Engineer and I'm the Energy Manager, I work at a university. And so if you're on a university, your job is to help educate people, I believe, right? And so--
So how can we inspire the students that have no clue? We're not an engineering school here, but you don't know who, who you're going to touch on what level. And so I think it's important that we share this kind of stuff with anybody that'll listen.
Right.
Well, I love how we were talking about the phase change material, what sounds like it would be sealed up in a box underground. So you're not really going to see it once it's in place.
But with this kind of stuff, it may not and the total energy that's flowing through it may be fairly negligible compared to the overall campus, but it's super visible, and it's, it's gonna touch a lot more people. So it has a completely different purpose. But it's still I mean, like you said, it's got real utility in, in really specific cases, which you just, you know, it's way cheaper than running diesel generators or something like that all over the place. So that's, that's great.
Right.
Exactly, exactly, you know, there's no noise, there's no anything, you know. A a lot of things, like I said, that we, that we should be doing are--just because we can't do this giant thing, we should, if we can do it, we should still be able to do small stuff because you don't know what person you're going to inspire to come up with the next giant thing.
Right.
Right? And so, you know another cool thing that we're doing, there's so many, you know, we're doing condensate recovery, right? Because I have a tunnel system, I have a bunch of air handlers that are in that tunnel system. So I'm able to pipe all of those. And so instead of letting that condensate go down the drain, we worked with a company called DripCycle. They develop this, it's so simple, right? But it's like, you know, they came up with it as their design, graduate students from--I forget what university they're from. But we're now taking all that water, and we're pumping it through the tunnel. So from the farthest one it pumps halfway through to another one to a bigger tank, we take condensate from those, and we're just using a little giant to pump it from the big air handler to a tank. Once we get so much in the tank, we pump it farther down the tunnel, and eventually we'll pump it into the cooling tower. We're looking at a million gallons a year of condensate recovery.
Yeah so a little bit goes a long way if you could capture it all right. Yeah.
Exactly. And so when, when I did that project, though, I did it with clear PVC pipe. And everybody says, "Why are you spending the money on clear PVC pipe?" I said, "Well. every year I open up the central plant for tours, and I give people, I give students, faculty, anybody that comes in, we spend a day touring the campus, touring the--you know--what does it take to make chilled water? What is it, what is the cooling tower for? What are boilers? What are chillers? What does an air handler look like? And now how cool would it be as you're walking down through the tunnel and you look up and you hear this water gurgling past you in this clear pipe? You can really tell the story, you know? This is free water that just comes out of the air. And when you say that normally we dump a million gallons of that down the drain every year. Those are stories that we use also to inspire people to do greater things I believe.
Yeah, no, I love it. Well, Kenny, I'm sure I could talk to you for many hours. And I know both of us have other things we got to get back to today, like running a campus in your case. But I did want to just say thank you for coming on and talking about all the great work you're doing. Any closing thoughts you want to leave our listeners with? And then also ways for them to get in touch with you if they want to reach out?
Yeah, sure. I think you're going to put together some web page or something, right? With with some links and stuff?
Absolutely.
So, my email, I would look me up on LinkedIn. I'm the only Ken, Kenny Seaton on LinkedIn, I think, so it makes it easy to find me. I'm not a Smith. I love to share on LinkedIn. I love to share ideas. And then the other thing is, like I said, if better as possible, good is not enough. Think about what you're doing, right? Think about how can we get the most bang for our buck out of this widget? How can it work with something else? Those are the things we need to think about. And designed to the 90%, not to the 10%. Let's make adjustments for the 10%. Make this world less greenhouse gas better.
I love it. I love it. I learned a lot today. So thank you again for taking the time to come on the show.
No, this is great. Thanks for having me, Dave.
Excellent. Thanks, Kenny. Talk to you soon.
All right.
That's it for this episode. Thanks to Kelsey Harding for her production assistance. Our music is "Under The Radar," courtesy of Dallas based musician and composer Gio Washington-Wight and his studio big band. If you'd like to follow our show on social media, our Twitter handle is @energypodcast. You can also find us on LinkedIn; just search for campus energy and sustainability podcast. If you'd like to support the show, consider leaving a rating or review on iTunes. As always, thanks for listening.
