An enduring partnership enables UT Austin to deliver innovation, efficiency and energy savings.

This article originally appeared in Districted Energy Magazine

Juan Ontiveros, PE, Associate Vice President for Utilities and Energy Management, The University of Texas at Austin; and Ben Erpelding, PE, Chief Technology Officer, Optimum Energy

In 2007, The University of Texas at Austin (UT) was on the brink of massive change. With the campus expanding and its cooling systems at capacity, UT’s energy management team built a new chiller plant – and then took a chance on cutting-edge optimization software, betting that it would help keep costs down and conserve resources. It was the first step in what turned into a 13-year journey to implement increasingly complex and innovative energy efficiency measures across a steadily growing campus.

The initial chiller plant optimization project led to an ongoing engineering partnership between the UT Utilities and Energy Management (UEM) team and Optimum Energy that is reducing costs by $15 million a year and has turned the university into one of the world’s most efficient utilities.

By combining efficiency measures with two thermal energy storage (TES) systems, UT is managing load growth, saving money and energy, and supporting the university’s sustainability goals. It has managed to reduce the chilled-water system’s overall energy usage and avoid investing in new power production capacity – even as the campus has grown by over 30 percent.

The UT and Optimum teams’ collaboration and methodical – almost religious – approach to gathering accurate data have allowed them to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible with optimization, building on each successful incremental change until, in 2019, UT achieved an average efficiency of 89 percent for all systems.

Read full article here

We’re excited to announce our latest customer success case study, with the University of Texas at Austin.

Our partnership with the University of Texas at Austin has lasted for more than a decade, and during that time we have helped them achieve what seemed impossible: reducing their chilled water system’s overall energy usage as the campus grew. The long-term phased approach we took together combines industry-leading chiller plant optimization software, powerful cloud-based analytics, and a dedicated team of support engineers, all working hand-in-hand with the UT Austin operations team to support their mission. Together, OptimumLOOP and the OptiCx platform now run the University’s chiller plants at an incredible 0.59 kW/ton system-wide efficiency across 63,000 tons of cooling capacity, saving almost 30 Million kWh per year, reducing CO2 emissions by 72,000 tons per year, and contributing to a peak load reduction of 4.2 MW.

For more information on how we have built this successful partnership with UT Austin, and the amazing efficiency milestones we’ve helped them reach, click here to download our newest case stud