Marshall Swearingen, MSU News Service
BOZEMAN — As a result of more than a decade of efforts to improve the energy efficiency of its buildings, including the development of innovative and interconnected “energy districts” on its campus, Montana State University has been featured in a new publication by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The 145-page report, titled "A Guide to Energy Master Planning of High-Performance Districts and Communities," includes a photo of MSU's Norm Asbjornson Hall on the inside cover and highlights MSU as one of 15 case studies showing how smart planning and new technology can dramatically reduce energy consumption in multibuilding settings like college campuses.
"We're in good company with these case studies," which include Stanford University and Cornell Tech, said Megan Sterl, MSU's engineering and utilities manager. "It shows that we're proving a model of energy conservation and innovation that can be adopted by others."
NREL invited MSU to participate in the publication in the wake of MSU completing Norm Asbjornson Hall in 2018. Funded largely by a $50 million private gift from the namesake MSU alumnus, the building uses roughly one-third the energy per square foot as comparable buildings on campus.
The building uses technologies that have become fundamental to MSU’s overall energy strategy, including large panels called solar walls that warm air used to ventilate the building and devices called heat pumps that regulate the building's temperature by transferring heat to where it's needed. The heat pumps are connected to a system that circulates water through 104 geothermal "boreholes" — underground pipes encased in heat conducting grout to a depth of 500 feet — that store unused warmth for later in the day or season.
The plan in the coming years is to connect the Asbjornson Hall system with nearby buildings that are currently being renovated and improved to create the South Campus energy district, Sterl said.
MSU found earlier success with energy districts after retrofitting the heating, ventilation and cooling, or HVAC, systems in its Leon Johnson, Wilson and Tietz buildings. A new heat pump system for those buildings was connected to geothermal boreholes built when MSU constructed Jabs Hall, which opened in 2015. This energy district allows excess heat to be transferred among the four buildings or stored in the geothermal system. The retrofit resulted in a 40% drop in energy use — equating to annual savings of roughly $130,000 — in those buildings between 2007 and 2017.
"We're on the leading edge of campuses that have explored and begun to understand the benefits of these energy districts," said Daniel Stevenson, associate vice president of university services. "Through early planning, we've been able to structure new building projects to complement each other and to lay the path for improving existing campus buildings."
The ongoing renovation of MSU’s historic Romney Hall, which began in 2019, has provided numerous opportunities. A complementary infrastructure project drilled 92 geothermal boreholes 700 feet deep to connect to Romney’s new, efficient heat pump system and serve the nearby Marga Hosaeus Fitness Center. The next step, according to Stevenson, is to connect that geothermal system with the one at Norm Asbjornson Hall to create a larger South Campus energy district. The combined system will consist of more than 40 miles of heat exchanger coupled to the earth below and will eventually be tied to updated HVAC systems in the MSU’s library, Reed Hall and other buildings in the vicinity.
"Our long-term goal is to evolve campus to a very economically responsible operating model that also achieves a very low carbon footprint," Stevenson said. "We're doing this with the resources we have in a pragmatic way, as the opportunity presents itself."
MSU has received other recognition for its energy efficiency. Norm Asbjornson Hall was the 10th building in Montana to be certified as LEED Platinum, the U.S. Green Building Council's highest certification. Seven other MSU buildings have been certified as LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Jabs Hall, funded by a $25 million gift from MSU alumnus and Montana native Jake Jabs, earned LEED Gold in 2016.
The NREL report is the clearest recognition to date for MSU's strategy of linking its buildings together to achieve efficiencies beyond what the structures can attain individually, Stevenson said.
"We're doing something that's not being widely done — yet," he said. "As we gain information and experience with these new age energy districts, MSU hopes to help the building industry integrate these strategies to address degrading infrastructure and pressure to reduce operating costs while dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions."
This story is available on the Web at: http://www.montana.edu/news/20701
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