Energy Star helping some schools reduce electric use

Many shoppers for large appliances seek out the familiar Energy Star logo on yellow-and-black labels to see whether a washer or dryer would save them money on electricity costs.

It's less well known that Energy Star, a federal program, also runs a voluntary rating system for schools and school districts to help raise awareness of the potential for energy savings on a larger scale.

Of Pennsylvania's 500 school districts, about 50 participate in the program; 10 are in the Philadelphia area. Seven New Jersey districts, including one in South Jersey, participate by submitting power-usage figures.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Mid-Atlantic region recently cited the Upper Merion School District in Montgomery County for reducing energy consumption by more than 30 percent since the program started there four years ago. According to the EPA, only about a dozen of the nation's 15,000 participating school districts have hit that level.

Energy reduction at several Upper Merion school buildings has neared 50 percent, the EPA said. Two - Candlebrook and Bridgeport Elementary Schools - had Energy Star ratings of 98 and 95 percent, respectively, meaning they were more energy-efficient by those percentages than all schools in the program nationwide.

The district, which spent about $1.6 million on energy in the year before starting the program, has saved approximately $400,000 annually, or about 25 percent. It did so largely by having a staffer monitor and modify energy use via a computer system linking the schools to his laptop.

"The theory in many institutions is that utilities were a fixed cost that you had minimal control over," said Fred Remelius, Upper Merion's buildings and grounds supervisor and resident energy guru. "What we've shown is that it's not a fixed cost, it's something that you can control."

The achievement is all the more noteworthy because the 3,800-student Upper Merion district did not hire an outside consultant to help it achieve the savings, as many do.

"They've done a great job," said Andrew Kreider, an EPA employee based in Philadelphia who works with school districts. "And they've done it on their own; that should inspire others to see what they can do to save energy."

Remelius said he embarked on his money-saving quest after learning in 2005 that the annual energy cost for a new middle school would be $300,000 more than for the building it replaced. That was because it was larger, fully air-conditioned, and had high-tech classroom equipment that costs more to operate.

"My response was to say, OK, we have to figure out how to minimize the impact," Remelius said in an interview last week.

The district operates nine buildings, six of them schools, that total about 950,000 square feet, he said. Their energy use is equivalent to about 560 houses.

The key piece in the district's bid for energy savings, Remelius said, was to create a new position to monitor and control energy use.

"Half of the job is to be really focused on how we use our energy at Upper Merion - to operate our energy-management system on a daily and sometimes hourly basis," Remelius said. (Much of the rest is supervising the district's preventive maintenance program.)

Sitting in a small office at the high school last week, energy manager Chris Shaffer pulled up a schematic of the middle school power system on his laptop. Green rectangles showed equipment - building fans, mostly - in operation; blue ones showed idled fans, boilers, and air-conditioning chillers. With a few finger taps, Shaffer can turn on or adjust the output of all that, plus the dampers that let air in and out of the building.

He has tweaked the schools' energy systems so well, Remelius said, that most of the time the middle school runs on one of its three boilers and one of two chillers; originally, all three boilers and both chillers were in regular use.

For example, when students head to lunch, classroom and cafeteria temperatures are adjusted accordingly for only as long as needed. Shaffer also manipulates air flow and heating in the school to bring it to the right temperature on Monday mornings in 45 minutes; it used to take 21/2 hours.

"The human element of having someone fly your buildings like a pilot flies an airplane is key," Remelius said. "Unless there is someone watching all the time, a lot of stuff will crash and start using up a lot of energy."