Key Projects

Challenge:

When The Pingry School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey was looking to ‘green’ their campus, they called upon The Fulcrum Group to guide them to that end. Of the several areas of assistance that  Fulcrum provided at Pingry two objectives in particular included a carbon footprint study and a demand reduction program. Beginning with data logging of the campus’ actual electric demand, The Fulcrum Group was able to identify that there was spare capacity at main electric service which would alleviate the school’s short term need to upgrade. Even after identifying with actual engineering data that the prime motivating reason for reducing electric demand was no longer an issue, The Fulcrum Group continued with the demand reduction program with the support of The Pingry School.

Several demand reduction measures were identified and analyzed for potential cost savings, estimated investment, and site specific logistical issues. The returns on investment for each demand reduction measure tabulated and present to The Pingry School for approval.

The Fulcrum Solution:

In the end, the electric demand was reduced through a combination of shifting cooling demand away from roof-top DX to a centralized high efficiency water-cooled plant. Variable air volume systems with tuning of the operating parameter and static pressures allowed variable speed drives to ramp down and draw the least amount of electric power necessary. Coupled with the electric demand reduction measures was a carbon mitigation study. The entire site and source carbon footprint was calculated to establish a baseline for comparison.

Results:

The Pingry School’s entire building energy efficiency improved by 30% with over 60% in fossil fuel savings, enough fossil fuel save to heat over 150 homes. The carbon footprint of the campus was reduced by 20% or the same amount of carbon offset by all the trees in Central Park Manhattan.