Case Study
How VITALITY helped University of Utah create comprehensive energy management system
Company
Summary
The University of Utah has created a comprehensive energy management system with the help of VITALITY.
Published
December 17, 2020
A bit of context
The University of Utah (“U”) is a public university founded in 1850 with a world class medical school and research facilities, a top notch law school and a leading edge technology research and development effort. U graduates have made major contributions in many fields of endeavor including technology, the arts, medicine, and business.
23,789 undergraduate students and 8,071 graduate students occupy approximately 400 buildings on a campus situated in the beautiful foothills looking over historic Salt Lake City. Environmentally responsible, the U has implemented many measures to improve energy efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint.
Working with the University
Since 2009, VITALITY has provided a number of different services, including, measurement and verification of implemented energy projects, utility metering design and implementation as well as turn-key metering services. VITALITY has also overseen the implementation of a custom version of the VITALITY system that provides vital energy metrics to the Energy Management Department as well as enabling a robust utility sub-billing function that allows specific allocation of energy costs across the many campus buildings and departments.
Measurement & Verification
After doing a full-scale energy conservation project with a nationwide Energy Services Company (ESCO) the University of Utah was looking at a way to measure the return on their investment from an independent third party. VITALITY was hired to solve this issue. We started by creating a custom application through the VITALITY Software platform that takes all the data from before and after the project and generates a return on the University’s investment. After nearly five years of delivering this service, the University of Utah continues to use the data provided through VITALITY to make decisions on current projects as well as future energy conservation measures.
Programming & Commissioning
After the implementation of the energy meters during the construction phase. VITALITY oversaw the programming and commissioning of the energy meters. The commissioning included verifying correct installation, placement and manufacturer guidelines for data accuracy. VITALITY programmed all of the meters to communicate back to a central data acquisition server that would be pushing all the data back to the VITALITY software platform.
Services Provided
Engineering
& Design
Programming & Commissioning
Identify
Cause Of Peak Demand
Design Build Metering
Over 1,000 meters in over 100 buildings have been programmed and commissioned under VITALITY
Ongoing Impact
VITALITY helps maintain the function and data accuracy of over one-thousand meters that have been installed across the campus. This includes hardware maintenance and troubleshooting, verification of programming points and oversight of new construction. Recently, VITALITY has helped transition key metering connection points and data acquisition from the existing Building Automation System (BAS) to a more comprehensive Data Acquisition Server (DAS) to improve data integrity and reduce network problems that have grown as the metering network has expanded to current proportions.
100
Buildings
1,000
Meters
100%
VITALITY Platform
