In the past year, UBC Facilities’ Energy & Water Services led three key projects to help UBC meet our sustainability goals and lessen energy and water usage on the Vancouver campus.
The LED Lighting Retrofit Project in the David Strangway Building replaced existing fluorescent lamps and pot lights with LED lamps and energy-efficient retrofits. These upgrades are projected to reduce UBC’s annual electrical energy consumption by 85,000 kWh and greenhouse gas emissions by 0.95 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
In Earth Sciences Building, Energy & Water Services worked to prevent unnecessary water consumption. A fan upgrade project completed 2 years prior replaced the existing fume hood exhaust metal fans with plastic fans. The original fans required acid scrubbers to prevent corrosion from the exhaust stream. The new plastic fans, which are corrosion resistant, eliminate the need for the scrubbers that use 24gpm of water. The team, alongside Safety & Risk Services and Building Operations, navigated downstream concerns that arose from turning off the scrubbers, testing the facility’s water output acidity levels and airflow rate for the fume hoods and finding them within safe parameters. The project is estimated to save the equivalent of 19 Olympic Sized swimming pools worth of water each year.
Occupancy sensors were installed in ten buildings to provide feedback signals to the building’s mechanical systems, optimizing heating and cooling based on real-time room usage. This reduces energy consumption and operational costs through reduced run time hours and wear and tear on building mechanical systems. The sensors are projected to reduce UBC’s annual energy usage by 143,200 kWh and greenhouse gas emissions by 1.62 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e)2. This is the equivalent of taking 24 gasoline-powered cars off the road.