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Texas Tech Found $977K in Savings, Captured $97K, and Rebuilt Its Optimization Program to Close the Gap
Texas Tech University's energy team spent its first year identifying nearly $977,000 in potential energy savings. It captured $97,000 of it.
Texas Tech had the ideas. What it lacked was the in-house skill to act on them. "The gap that we had was in implementation and capability," said Brandon McCoy, associate management director for energy management at Texas Tech University. Years of retirement and turnover had drained the university's controls knowledge, leaving it dependent on outside vendors for day-to-day work.
That dependence was expensive. Texas Tech was spending more than $500,000 a year with controls vendors on service tickets alone, before any project work. It also had no dedicated budget for optimization; that money competed directly against a long deferred-maintenance list. Texas requires its government facilities to cut energy use 2% a year, and the campus keeps growing at the same time, adding students, research buildings, and lab loads that eat into any efficiency gain. To create accountability without a funding line, the department set a target instead: identify $750,000 in annual cost avoidance, and put the prioritization decisions in front of leadership.
Leadership's answer changed the vendor relationship. Rather than pay per service call, Texas Tech worked with one controls vendor to embed a controls engineer on staff as a day-to-day operator, at $208,000 a year, well under what the university had been paying for tickets. Then it redefined the job. "We redefined it to not just be service, but also to be training-focused," McCoy said. The embedded engineer trained the control-center operators, the new in-house controls team, and the HVAC technicians.
Once staff could read the control logic themselves, the savings started to stick. In year two, as the team recommissioned systems back to their original design intent, cost avoidance climbed to $492,000. Texas Tech has since ended the embedded-engineer contract and now runs the program with a three-person in-house controls team, tracking $270,000 so far this year against the $750,000 goal.
To keep that knowledge from leaking back out, the university now requires commissioning and documentation before any project closeout, so a building's setup survives the next round of turnover. McCoy's framing for the whole shift is to "treat vendors as upskilling partners." The same dollars that once bought service calls now buy a team that can do the work itself.
Identifying $977,000 in savings was never the hard part. Capturing it meant building a team that could do the work, and paying a vendor to teach them how.
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Texas Tech University's energy team spent its first year identifying nearly $977,000 in potential energy savings. It captured $97,000 of it.
Texas Tech had the ideas. What it lacked was the in-house skill to act on them. "The gap that we had was in implementation and capability," said Brandon McCoy, associate management director for energy management at Texas Tech University. Years of retirement and turnover had drained the university's controls knowledge, leaving it dependent on outside vendors for day-to-day work.
That dependence was expensive. Texas Tech was spending more than $500,000 a year with controls vendors on service tickets alone, before any project work. It also had no dedicated budget for optimization; that money competed directly against a long deferred-maintenance list. Texas requires its government facilities to cut energy use 2% a year, and the campus keeps growing at the same time, adding students, research buildings, and lab loads that eat into any efficiency gain. To create accountability without a funding line, the department set a target instead: identify $750,000 in annual cost avoidance, and put the prioritization decisions in front of leadership.
Leadership's answer changed the vendor relationship. Rather than pay per service call, Texas Tech worked with one controls vendor to embed a controls engineer on staff as a day-to-day operator, at $208,000 a year, well under what the university had been paying for tickets. Then it redefined the job. "We redefined it to not just be service, but also to be training-focused," McCoy said. The embedded engineer trained the control-center operators, the new in-house controls team, and the HVAC technicians.
Once staff could read the control logic themselves, the savings started to stick. In year two, as the team recommissioned systems back to their original design intent, cost avoidance climbed to $492,000. Texas Tech has since ended the embedded-engineer contract and now runs the program with a three-person in-house controls team, tracking $270,000 so far this year against the $750,000 goal.
To keep that knowledge from leaking back out, the university now requires commissioning and documentation before any project closeout, so a building's setup survives the next round of turnover. McCoy's framing for the whole shift is to "treat vendors as upskilling partners." The same dollars that once bought service calls now buy a team that can do the work itself.
Identifying $977,000 in savings was never the hard part. Capturing it meant building a team that could do the work, and paying a vendor to teach them how.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.