News - The University of Montana

Yeah!  The legislature passed HB5 and UM is set to receive approximately $6.3 million dollars for energy projects and deferred maintenance.  The first projects we are going to get out the door are campus wide lighting upgrades, and replacement of steam traps within buildings.  The lighting upgrades are pretty self-explanatory, but what the heck are steam traps?

Steam traps are the connection between the steam and condensed water systems.  Steam leaves the heating plant, and when it rejects the heat into the building it condenses.  The steam traps are the device that remove the condensate from the steam system, without wasting steam.

However, when those steam traps begin to malfunction, they begin to pass steam through, wasting it, not even using it in the building.  They are difficult devices to troubleshoot, and expensive to maintain.  Because of this, most will be replaced that have been identified as being in any state of failure.  It’s about the same cost, and many of the traps are very old already.

The rest of the projects will be implemented in 2 phases, and the specifics of those remain to be seen.  The ball is in the state’s court right now (their Architecture and Engineering Division), and we’ll get them out the door just as soon as we can.

I have been working on the results of the energy audits for about a month now.  I’ve reviewed each potential project, and returned the list to the consultant for additional information on many of them which is necessary to determine if the projects are truly viable.  Once I receive their replies, I”ll be able to further review the projects and create a firm list of projects that I consider technically viable, and with a realistic energy savings.

In the meantime, I’ve been using the data from the report to build a tentative list of projects for this legislative session.  The legislature, using federal stimulus money, has a bill which proposes to fund energy project with revolving loan money, and supplement that funding with with non-loan (like a grant) monies.  The non-loan money is critical to the implementation of the projects, because many of them do not have adequate energy savings to pay for themselves, and this will allow us to do more projects and address many deferred maintenance issues.  Deferred maintenance is what we call the regular replacement of systems, as they fail or near the end of their useful life.

Our most recent list for this funding shows that we might be able to save approximately 6% of the University’s electric consumption, and 6% of the natural gas consumption, with a totoal cost of $6.5 million.  That will go a long way towards meeting the Governor’s 20×10 initiative, and also the University’s Climate commitment.

We should see in the coming weeks what the legislature decides on funding these type of projects, and we look forward to implementing as many and as soon as possible.

Today the “final” energy audit reports were delivered.  Since this is the first major round of energy audits done on campus for at least 15 years, this is very exciting!  Now we must go through each proposed project, and critically analyze it to make sure the potential savings are achievable, and that the proposed solution will actually work.  It’s very easy to say something like a new “smart controls” will save energy, it’s another to have it both save energy, and work.  We asked the audit team to push the envelope and so now we must vet their ideas.

Last fall, UM hired CTA to perform audits on 15 buildings on campus.  Those buildings include the UC, Todd, Art Annex/Pool, Student Rec Center, Education, Skaggs (older section), Anderson, Davidson Honors College, Fine Arts , Liberal Arts,  Music, PARTV, Rankin, Social Science, and BioResearch.

Projects that are identified as viable will proceed via a couple of different paths, and it is not yet finalized which path we will use.  UM expects to receive some Federal Stimulus Funding, perhaps some state funding, and another option is called “performance contracting (PC)”.  PC is not yet a legal way for the University to do projects, but a bill in the legislature is expected to pass very soon which would allow us to use that too.  PC uses a method different than design, bid, build, which is the only method we are currently allowed to use.  Hopefully within the next few months we’ll have a direction on how to implement the identified projects.  Stay tuned.