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May 16, 2024
Maintaining your town or city infrastructure is a never-ending job. As soon as one issue is solved, another comes up. The good news is that you can save energy, reduce operating and maintenance costs, and be a good steward of taxpayer money by implementing energy-saving upgrades in public buildings and properties.
The result? Fewer headaches and more time to focus on the important business of serving your community. Here are five key considerations from Efficiency Smart to get you going.
The first step is to identify your motivations for reducing energy consumption. Some municipalities might focus on reducing costs. Others might want to reduce the staff time spent on maintaining lighting or HVAC systems. Whatever your goal, make sure your municipal staff is aligned so that you can make progress together.
Sharing your goals with your local Efficiency Smart account manager can help our team provide recommendations tailored to your community. From suggesting projects that will maximize energy savings to tracking reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from upgrades, Efficiency Smart is here to help.
When it comes to energy efficiency, data is your friend.
Tracking your energy use across municipal buildings is a lot less daunting than it sounds. By benchmarking your current energy use, you’ll have a baseline to understand which buildings use the most energy, and a reference point to measure progress against.
ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager is a free tool to help you get started. Portfolio Manager gives you an “energy score” for many building types compared to similar buildings. This can be a helpful tool for prioritizing your energy efficiency efforts: If a building scores low, it might be a good place to start. As a bonus, you can also get additional information such as water and waste scores for your buildings.
Portfolio Manager also allows you to create more in-depth reports based on metrics you may be interested in.
Have questions about using Portfolio Manager? Efficiency Smart can help.
Did you know that a wastewater treatment plant is usually a municipality’s largest energy user? Somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of a municipality’s total energy bill typically comes from its wastewater treatment plant.
One common energy-saving opportunity is to add high-efficiency motors with variable frequency drives (VFDs). Efficiency Smart can tour your facility to determine if working with an engineering firm to install VFDs makes sense for you. We can also review contractor proposals and verify potential energy savings.
Whether you have one municipal building or 100, installing LED lighting will help save energy. To protect your investment, look for products on the DesignLights Consortium (DLC) Qualified Products List. These items have been independently tested and verified to be highly efficient and have at least a five-year warranty.
Give your outdoor lighting some love, too. Chances are that you have streetlights and maybe even some parking garages with overhead lighting. Transitioning to LEDs can reduce your lighting energy use by up to 40 percent, saving a good chunk of change in the long run. Plus, LEDs last up to four times longer than other models, so you’ll also save yourself from future maintenance headaches. Bonus: no more flickering lights.
Switching the bulbs in your streetlights and parking garages can be done in phases to spread out the upfront cost and workload. The project cost will vary depending on whether you can use the existing fixtures (i.e. just screw in a new bulb).
Efficiency Smart can inventory lights for your municipality to provide an accurate estimate of fixture types and potential cost savings from upgrades. We can also identify a range of options, from easier replacements that can be completed with existing staff to larger projects that may require planning, to help you prioritize the projects that best fit your municipality’s needs.
It rarely makes financial sense to replace a functioning HVAC system with a newer, more efficient one. Instead, be prepared to upgrade to a more efficient model when your existing system fails. A new efficient system might cost more upfront than a conventional system, but the price difference will be recouped through energy savings over its lifetime.
Efficiency Smart can provide guidance at any stage of the decision-making process. This includes explaining the pros and cons of different options and reviewing vendor proposals to calculate energy savings.
You can find more recommendations in our HVAC guide.
Efficiency Smart is your energy efficiency partner from start to finish. We help residents, businesses, and municipalities identify and prioritize energy-saving projects. We also provide financial incentives on qualifying projects.
Contact your local key account manager or our customer support team at (877) 889-3777 or [email protected] to get started.
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