CBP Magazine: Articles

With high-performance HVAC equipment, school systems can put the savings from energy bills into the classroom.

These are challenging times for American educators. They are under enormous pressure to raise test scores, improve graduation rates, and prepare students to succeed in a global economy. Meanwhile, falling property tax revenues, rising operating and maintenance costs, and other factors have forced school administrators to make tough decisions as they struggle to create a learning environment in which students, teachers, and staff can do their best work.

Spending on new schools, additions, and alterations fell a whopping 22% last year and is flat this year. With spending forecast to exceed $49 billion in 2012, on its way to $70 billion by the middle of the decade, expansion in school construction activity will far outpace the growth in healthcare, hospitality, general office, or any other segment of the commercial-construction industry.

The focus is going to be on designing and building green, high-performance schools that create a better learning environment while saving energy, resources, and taxpayers' money. An effective strategy reduces energy waste and redirects savings to the classroom.

School administrators hesitate to commit scarce resources to anything that does not directly affect classroom performance. There is little doubt that environmental factors have a huge impact- positive or negative-on the ability of teachers to teach and students to learn.

Consider this: 44% of public school principals said that environmental factors such as lighting, heating, air conditioning, indoor air quality, and acoustics interfered with classroom instruction at their school, according to a 2007 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Washington. More than half of the principals said that heating and air conditioning interfered with instruction, more than any other factor cited in the survey.

The General Accounting Office, Washington, says about 14 million American students-about one in four-attend schools that are dangerous or below standard structurally and that almost two-thirds of schools have building features (such as air-conditioning systems) that need extensive repairs or replacement.

Numerous studies have found links between classroom and workplace performance and indoor environmental factors such as airflow, lighting, humidity, and temperature. A 2005 survey by Turner Construction, New York, found that more than 70% of green schools reported reduced absenteeism and higher student performance.

High-performance schools can create a context for educating children about the importance of energy efficiency and how the decisions they make at school and at home affect energy consumption and the environment.

The commercial-construction community is positioned to improve the learning environment. School officials rely on architects, designers, contractors, and other building professionals to help them make decisions that make sense on the drawing board, during construction, on the first day of class, and throughout the life expectancy of a new school, which might reach 50 years.

Heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) technology provides a perfect example. Those who consider only the cost of buying and installing an HVAC system might be tempted to choose the least expensive system. By examining total lifecycle costs (including energy consumption, operating expenses, repair, maintenance, and other factors), it likely makes more sense to spend 2% to 3% more on the front end to acquire a more efficient system that can save 10% in annual energy costs over its lifetime.

It can be a challenge to make energy-efficient choices in a public school setting. There is often a wall that can be tough to break through between the capital spending and the operating budgets, with different departments controlling each budget.

This is where construction-industry advisors come in. Often, it is easier for an impartial third party (such as an architect, designer, or facilities engineer) to put things into perspective and point out the advantages by comparing the total cost of ownership to initial costs.

HVAC technologies play an instrumental part in creating high-performance schools that have a smaller carbon footprint than those built even a few years ago. New environmentally friendly HVAC systems use a low-flow, low-temperature design with smaller pipes and pumps. They consume fewer natural resources, use less energy for water circulation, and have a smaller mechanical footprint (which gives architects more flexibility). New products use colder water to make colder air that can be distributed in smaller ducts, using less energy for fan circulation. Other benefits include quieter operation and lower relative humidity.

Other new technologies include thermal-energy storage systems. In an ice supplemental system, the chilled water system makes ice at night, during non-peak hours when power costs are lower. The ice melts during the day to generate more cool air without the need to add another chiller. The use of biomass boilers also can help schools manage their heating and cooling costs by using wood or other lower-cost fuels rather than natural gas.

Central geothermal technology can lower operating costs and is environmentally responsible because it uses the Earth as a heat source in winter and a heat sink in summer. Maintenance costs are also reduced because there is only a single unit, compared with the 50 or more water-source heat pumps that might be required.

Integrated with lighting, plumbing, and electrical systems, modern HVAC technologies can take a huge bite out of the $8 billion in energy bills American schools run up every year. In fact, the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council (SBIC), Washington, estimates that new schools can save 30% to 40% of their energy costs with a high-performance, sustainable design and construction approach that includes integrating HVAC and other key subsystems.

Advancements in building-automation systems have delivered significant benefits by enabling facility managers to automatically control HVAC, lighting, and other environmental subsystems to achieve peak efficiency. The systems have proven particularly useful in helping schools adapt to varying occupancy levels and changing schedules. Other key design practices with energy-saving potential include energy recovery, thermal zoning, system-level controls, and air balancing

In its Advanced Energy Design Guide, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), Atlanta, offers region-specific recommendations to help designers of elementary and secondary schools achieve at least 30% energy savings with off-the-shelf HVAC technology. Download the document at http://www.ashrae.org

Enrollment in U.S. public and private elementary and secondary schools is expected to grow about 8% to nearly 60 million by 2018, with some Sun Belt and Mountain states looking at increases of 20% to 30%.

The NCES estimates that 15% of schools have enrollments exceeding their design capacity. Some schools use portable classrooms to deal with overcrowding.

The demand for more classroom space cannot be met with new buildings alone. It is also important to focus on upgrading existing schools that, for the most part, have been badly neglected over the years. Expansions, alterations, and retrofits will keep construction professionals busy in the years ahead.

The average school building is 42 years old; almost three-fourths of the schools were built more than 30 years ago. HVAC and other environmental systems today are many times more efficient than those designed in the 1970s, let alone those in the 1950s. ASHRAE estimates that the use of readily available off-the-shelf technology can yield savings of 20% to 30% when applied during renovation projects.

With limited resources and other priorities, many school districts have been forced to perform only the most critical HVAC repairs. Systems that are not maintained properly waste energy. Some experts estimate that deferred maintenance on equipment and school buildings totals at least $500 billion in accrued costs.

This underscores the important role that service can play in making schools greener and more energy efficient. When performed by qualified energy specialists, proper installation and start-up, routine maintenance and service, in-warranty support, and post-warranty work all help to ensure that HVAC equipment is running as efficiently and economically as possible throughout the life of the system.

Performance contracting can help administrators upgrade HVAC, lighting, windows, and other systems with minimal up-front costs and without affecting their capital budgets. A performance contract is a self-funding package of products and services customized to building requirements to deliver significant energy and operating cost reductions. Schools actually pay for much of the cost of upgrades with future energy savings.

Another form of financing for cash-strapped schools to consider is municipal leases, which allow a municipality to acquire needed equipment using funds from a lender and then repay the funds over time. There are also other grants, tax credits, and low-interest loans from federal and state governments and local utilities.

Although there are some who believe that green, energy-efficient schools cost significantly more to design and build than conventional schools, that is simply not true.

The 2006 study "Greening America's Schools, Costs and Benefits" by Gregory Kats analyzed data from 30 green schools built between 2001 and 2006. They found that the initial incremental cost of building a green building-the "green premium"-was about 2% of the total cost, or $3/sq. ft. The energy benefits alone were estimated to be $9 a square foot and total financial benefits to the school, its teachers, students, and the community were estimated at about 20 times the added cost.

The construction community has a pivotal role to play as the United States continues to focus on improving education and creating more high-performance schools. Architects, specifiers, and contractors can:

With the cost of building new schools and updating our aging educational infrastructure a major concern, making wise and energy-efficient choices on HVAC systems (and on every phase of the construction process) has never been a better way to go.

Schools Do The Math On Energy