"Campus Metabolism" at Arizona State University Offers Unique View into Sustainable Practices
Arizona State University's (ASU) interactive Campus Metabolism (CM) website (http://cm.asu.edu) offers a unique inside view into the university's commitment to sustainability initiatives, including its focus on the value of alternative energy resources and conservation.
Beginning in 2004 and in partnership with Arizona Public Service's Energy Services (APSES) group, the university installed utility-grade instrumentation to accurately monitor energy usage of its residential and educational buildings on campus. From the gathering of this data, ASU's Energy Information System (EIS) was created.
Drawing on comprehensive data from ASU's Energy Information System (EIS), Campus Metabolism brings a wealth of valuable information to students, researchers and the public. It also supports the initiatives of ASU's Global Institute for Sustainability. CM currently covers initiatives at the university's Tempe campus but will expand, along with the EIS system, to include ASU's three other campuses in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
The EIS system draws on technology from Kepware Technologies for OPC servers and Modbus drivers as well as Control Microsystems' SCADAPack. The KEPServerEX 5.0 provides a platform for capturing data from the field while Control Microsystems provides PLCs located throughout the campus to pull and translate data.
EIS is a secure, Internet-based application that incorporates a user friendly, graphical representation of real time and historical data. It documents energy use at the ASU Central Plant, Combined Heat & Power Plant and the rest of the Tempe campus. The EIS system provides the staff a way to monitor, and report energy usage in various buildings across the main campus and to provide the necessary information for staff to be able to allocate utility usage to the various campus buildings. A dedicated fiber optic network connects all buildings to the core EIS database. Currently, most of the buildings are sub-metered and the data being monitored from those buildings are consumption, temperatures, pressures, and flows for electricity, steam/hot water, chilled water, condensate return and renewable energy production.
History of Commitment to Environmental Best Practices
With more than 82,000 students and four campuses, Arizona State University is the largest public research university in the United States. From its beginnings in Tempe, ASU has expanded to include a West campus, a Polytechnic campus and its downtown Phoenix campus. As home to The Global Institute of Sustainability, ASU is dedicated to the advancement of research, education, and business practices for an urbanizing world. Its School of Sustainability, the first of its kind in the U.S., offers trans-disciplinary degree programs focused on finding practical solutions to environmental, economic, and social challenges.
Making sustainability part of its everyday practices, ASU embarked on an aggressive program of energy conservation and education. Today more than 100 campus buildings with thousands of I/O points are being monitored by EIS at the Tempe campus. Energy savings have come in many forms, from improved insulation to energy efficient lighting fixtures but especially from renewable resources like solar. Currently ASU generates about 4.66 megawatts of solar power for its Tempe campus and 4.6 megawatts on its West campus for a total of 9.26 megawatts of electrical generation. Furthermore, by the end of 2012, when EIS has been expanded to the other three campuses, it's expected that more than 15.9 megawatts of solar power will be utilized by ASU and monitored by the EIS.
Contributions of Solar Power
Robert Vandling, Technology Support Analyst Coordinator at ASU, is particularly proud of the advancing contributions solar energy is making to the overall energy saving initiatives. The Phoenix area boasts an average of 334 days of sunshine a year and thus is in an enviable position to be able to leverage opportunities for solar power.
"With over 9 megawatts of solar power online today," Robert says, "ASU is the largest university in the world in terms of solar generation. Furthermore, through our ongoing performance contracts, ASU has been able to reduce energy consumption – just electrical – by 5 megawatts over the past couple of years." He credits the university but also its partner, Arizona Public Service Energy Services (APSES). With a series of performance contracts and metering projects, Arizona State has modified its systems for even more cost savings. "The university has created a new fund called the Sustainability Initiative Renewable Fund. Through this fund, we're taking the savings we've generated and are putting it into new ways of funding energy renewables that have quick ROIs." According to Robert, "Kepware has been invaluable to us for the ability to keep moving forward in adding additional points from our SCADA infrastructure since we pull everything from the field through our SCADA network via Modbus TCP. All the additional solar we're putting in and all the additional points we'll be monitoring; including the other three campuses will require significant expansion of our EIS database. We'll be pulling similar kinds of data points to the same KEPServerEX platform that serves our SQL database."
Building the Infrastructure
According to Robert, "The entire EIS network on the Tempe campus has a dedicated fiber network completely separate from the normal network backbone. Where we couldn't get a fiber connection, we have a secure VLAN connection that's isolated from the student traffic so we can connect that to the same dedicated EIS fiber network."
ASU added utility-grade meters to all the buildings but didn't incorporate any of the building management systems, which are completely separate from the EIS. This created the need for a separate infrastructure that continues to evolve. The new meters pull information back to a central server, which gives an instantaneous look at the data. According to Robert, they do one-minute updates and after the first hour, the information is rolled up into 15-minute averages.
A sophisticated alarm system is in place that relies on five-day averages to send out warning and alert notifications if power consumption rises or falls within those targeted parameters.
KEPServerEX 5.0 serves as the communication backbone of the system. The PLCs in the field are from the Control MicroSystems SCADAPack and provide Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) functions for use in their SCADA and telemetry applications. "For example, the PLCs pull data from the utility-grade meters from the field when we are monitoring electricity. This data is in turn, pulled by Modbus Serial to the SCADA pack. The Control Microsystems SCADA pack translates the data to Modbus TCP/IP and KEPServerEX pulls on the PLC SCADAPack via Modbus TCP/IP back to the KEPServerEX. KEPServerEX then translates the data from Modbus TPC/IP to OPC. We then go from OPC into another application called OPC Systems .NET that contains the tagging and data logging capabilities. From this point, we do some of the computations like translating instantaneous Kilowatts into Kilowatt BTUs," Robert says. "On the chilled water side, we can also do the calculations on flow and temperature and turn it into tonnage. All that's done in our tag database in OPC Systems and then OPC Systems moves it into the OPC Datalogger and pushes it into our SQL database," he adds.
Campus Metabolism Supports Sustainability Curriculum
Campus Metabolism was developed as joint project of facilities management and ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability as well as student contributions. "We also had a lot of input from various other campus departments. Together, the goal was to bring forth a site where we could educate and inform faculty, students, staff and the public of ASU's commitment to its sustainability initiatives," Robert says.
Currently Campus Metabolism contains data from 24 buildings on the Tempe campus and all 18 of the solar power installations. Plans call for bringing the entire EIS database into CM where users will be able to view the university's entire utility structure on all 100 buildings.
Today users are able to view overall energy use in real time in select buildings, view a campus map and click on specific areas to determine energy consumption. Additionally there is a virtual-rooms tab that presents an interactive opportunity to learn what energy impact certain items, like lamps, radios, cell phones, etc. have on consumption in virtual office or virtual dorm room spaces. A new aspect of the site is at http://cm.edu.asu/weather, which offers multi-point overlays and identifies the impact of temperature, wind and other weather conditions. With colorful charts, graphs and history, CM serves as a significant teaching tool for both professors and students at the Global Institute of Sustainability.
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