by Ann Withanee — September 26, 2011—Siemens Industry, Inc., has announced that work under a recently signed $6.2 million performance contract for energy efficiency improvements to 27 facilities in DeSoto County, Mississippi, should reduce the county’s annual utility consumption 33 percent. The project is identified as the largest municipal performance contract of its kind in the state. Over the 15-year contract period, work by Siemens should reduce electricity consumption by county buildings by 37 million kWh.
DeSoto County, earmarked as one of the fastest growing counties in the state and one of the top 40 fastest growing counties in the U.S., turned to Siemens to help it fast-track critical upgrades to the county government’s buildings. Siemens teamed up with officials to secure $1 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grant funding, which the county leveraged to self-finance the overall project. Siemens, serving as the design/build general contractor, is managing the overall project, employing a local engineering firm and several local contractors and suppliers to implement the energy saving improvements to the county buildings.
Among the array of energy and operational saving improvements implemented will be a new chilled water plant to supply chilled water to the jail, courthouse, and administration buildings. The existing individual DX cooling units will be upgraded with high-efficiency chilled water coils. To reduce total cost of operations for the cooling system, Siemens’ Demand Flow chilled water system technology was specified as an integral part of the design.
Siemens energy audits, which create the baseline energy savings guaranteed in the performance contract, stipulate that over the contract’s 15-year duration DeSoto County will avoid the consumption of 37 million kWh of electricity, 516,840 Ccf of natural gas, 66.4 million gallons of water and a reduction in CO2 emissions by some 53 million lbs.—reportedly equivalent to taking over 4,000 cars off the road. Financially, the project’s energy and resource savings will yield the annual equivalent of $323,927 in avoided utility and operational costs.
The project’s scope includes retrofitting more than 6,000 T-12 OSRAM light fixtures, in each of the county’s 27 buildings. Twenty facilities will be fitted with new low-flow plumbing fixtures and among the county’s 27 buildings, and 19 will have Siemens’ APOGEE energy management systems installed. During the later phases of the facility improvement work, the courthouse will also have its existing DX split systems replaced with a highly efficient Variable-Air-Volume system with Hot Water heat.
Although system and building envelope improvements continue, early evaluation and consultative work by Siemens has helped the county earn a Green Globes Certification for the county’s Administration Building—the first existing building in the state of Mississippi to be certified under either Green Globes or the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Earning the designation requires leveraging best practices in energy efficiency, implementing smart decisions on how to operate a building, and defining big-picture parameters on becoming sustainable—from management to purchasing to employee awareness.
