Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) and the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) have completed two joint energy efficiency projects.
In total, the projects are saving the university 66,000 therms of energy every year. Both projects were part of California’s joint Energy Efficiency Partnership between state universities and investor-owned utilities. Over the last five years, SoCalGas has supported over 184 energy efficiency projects, saving university campuses over 6,000,000 therms of energy.
“Whole-building energy efficiency projects at UCSB have proven to be strong financial investments and have helped us create more comfortable, safer, and more controllable environments for campus end users,” said Jordan Sager, energy manager at UCSB. “SoCalGas has been a great partner to work with on these projects from start to finish.”
The first of the two UCSB projects began in 2018 as part of the university’s high opportunity projects and programs (HOPP’s) initiative. SoCalGas and Southern California Edison co-funded the project, which investigated how best to update two important laboratories at the university. The utilities conducted an energy management plan to document and list the savings, costs and measures to implement an energy efficient system.
The utilities identified multiple measures to reduce energy consumption in the building’s lighting and HVAC systems by installing occupancy sensors, wireless thermostats and low-power LED lights. The campus also added high efficiency dedicated natural gas boilers to each building. A new chilled water system including a cooling tower, and pumps were also installed. Following the installation of the energy efficient system, the utilities verified the energy systems using the Normalized Metered Energy Consumption (NMEC) approach, which uses building-level metered energy data to verify savings. The project resulted in natural gas savings of 60,959 therms.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, SoCalGas is the largest gas distribution utility in the United States. SoCalGas delivers renewable gas service to 21.8 million customers across 24,000 square miles of Central and Southern California.
