Project Overview

In March 2019, CEG completed implementation of a $58.1MM ESPC at Fort Knox, an Army post in Kentucky that supports over 28,000 soldiers, civilian employees, and family members. The project scope included comprehensive upgrades to a wide variety of building types (including classrooms, training facilities, offices, data centers, warehouses, maintenance facilities, industrial buildings, and housing) and ranged from single-room guard booths to the base’s mission-critical, 900k square-foot Human Resources Command. The project won four awards through the Department of Energy Better Buildings Initiative, including best use of lighting controls and highest percentage of annual savings for the lighting retrofit portion of the project.

Solution

Using our proven audit processes, we completed the Investment Grade Audit (IGA) of over 400 separate facilities in under six months as requested by the client. Our streamlined development leveraged in-depth data to uncover annual savings in excess of 118,000 MMBtu and nearly 50MM gallons of water, resulting in over $2.3MM in annual utility and O&M cost savings despite an already low-cost for electricity (<$0.06/kWh), free water, and $200+MM spent on previous energy-savings projects.

We analyzed over 20 million data points from over 4,200 BAS control points and 150 CEG-launched loggers. We used proprietary tools and scripts developed by our in-house engineering team to convert dense data sets into actionable information. Our analysis of trend data identified numerous retro-commissioning opportunities that we first implemented at 12 buildings during development as a proof-of-concept. Following the success of the proof-of-concept, these ECMs were applied to other in-scope buildings, ultimately reducing energy consumption and O&M requirements, and improving occupant comfort (e.g., reducing humidity and mold levels) while meeting Army design standards.

In addition to a wide array of lighting, HVAC, and BAS controls measures, CEG implemented several ECMs focused on the post’s mission critical data center. In order to mitigate the project’s impact on the Army’s ongoing computing operations, we focused our investigations on the data center’s cooling systems and worked closely with Fort Knox’s facilities and IT staff to ensure that our upgrades complied with federal cybersecurity protocols and ASHRAE data center standards. Preliminary data indicates that the average data center PUE has decreased from ~1.5 to ~1.2 as a result of this project. Furthermore, the data center cooling capacity made available by our project will allow the Army to increase its IT loading and thus facilitate consolidation of other military data centers as desired in the future.

Results

Over the course of the contract term, this project is predicted to save Fort Knox $11.1MM in operations, maintenance, repair, and replacement expenses, with $390k in verified first-year cost savings. LED installations in particular have alleviated post workflow: lighting service calls to Fort Knox’s 900,000 square foot Human Resources Command headquarters, which is the largest facility on post, declined by 90% between baseline and post-installation, going from more than one call a day to less than one call a week. Comparable results have been observed across the entire post.