by Shane Henson — June 29, 2012—utiliVisor, a provider of Web-based energy measurement, billing, and oversight capabilities that boost efficiency and lower energy consumption in buildings, recently installed a system that provides detailed end-to-end energy monitoring services for the chilled water generation systems at New York University’s (NYU) Langone Medical Center.
The NYU Langone Medical Center, comprised of 11 buildings with 2.9-million square feet, is located on Manhattan’s eastside. The facility includes the NYU School of Medicine, Tisch Hospital, Rusk Institute of Rehabilitative Medicine, and the Hospital for Joint Diseases.
utiliVisor is providing energy oversight of the chilled water generation systems and assisting NYU’s facilities staff in analyzing and improving the energy performance of the operations for three interconnected chiller plants located in the Tisch, Skirball and Smilow buildings, with an overall cooling capacity of 23,200 tons.
According to utiliVisor, the objective is to continuously reduce operating costs by making custom recommendations to increase the energy performance of the system holistically, reducing electric and steam consumption required to generate the chilled water. The service has had an added benefit of making the engineering staff aware of the ongoing performance of varying cooling loads within the facility by utilizing, storing and organizing interval data collected by conventional building automation systems.
To enable continuous performance monitoring, electric meters and steam meters were installed to measure all chilled water, pumping and tower fan energy. These new measurement devices were mapped in the existing automation system, which pushed measured interval data to the Web via an FTP site along with existing BTU measurement points, giving the plant operations staff a greatly improved viewpoint on plant efficiency. UtiliVisor’s operations center and NYU Langone staff now have a “real-time” online Web-based chiller plant analysis tool to evaluate the performance of both electric and steam-driven chillers, UtiliVisor says.
The implementation of the utiliVisor monitoring system is expected to save NYU Langone Medical Center a minimum of 10% in chilled water generation costs, notes the company.
