We are investigating how a building which houses a central chilled water plant for a campus can meet the prerequisite. This building houses the chillers and cooling towers plus some electrical equipment. There is an occupied control room and a couple of other spaces which will be fully conditioned by separate HVAC systems. It will not use any of the chilled water it generates. Our interpretation is that the DES guidance does not apply since the building is not served by the DES. The chilled water plant therefore becomes a process load and any savings would have to be demonstrated following the exceptional calcualtion method. Any thoughts? Has anyone heard of a stand-alone central plant building obtaining LEED certification? If so any insight on how they did the modeling to meet the minimum requirements?

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Jim Ratliff

Project Manager

Champlin Architecture

LEEDuser Basic Member

2 thumbs up

Thu, 03/31/2011 - 19:42

Did you see this comment yet? http://www.leeduser.com/credit/NC-2009/EAc1?page=1#comment-8802 I am currently working on a similar project. First make sure you can get 1 FTE.

Marcus Sheffer

LEED Fellow

7group / Energy Opportunities

LEEDuser Expert

4454 thumbs up

Thu, 03/31/2011 - 20:32

Interesting. There was an old CIR EAc1 Ruling dated 10/6/06 and the questions was "should the electricity used to create chilled water for the buildings other than the central plant be accounted for in the EA credit 1 calculation for the central plant building?" Ruling was "No. Although the language in ASHRAE/IESNA 90.1-2004 may suggest including the entire chiller capacity as a process load when modeling the plant building, such an interpretation is ambiguous and in any case that method is inappropriate for LEED purposes. When calculating process energy use for a central chiller plant building’s energy model, include only the percentage of the chiller plant capacity that is consumed within the central plant building itself." In our case the central plant building will not use any of the chilled water output, so we felt it did not apply. If the central plant building does use some of the outout from the plant then I think the DES requirements kick in. In our case, I don't think it does.

Christopher Snee

Sustainability Consultant

AECOM

LEEDuser Basic Member

7 thumbs up

Mon, 06/23/2014 - 18:08

Marcus, Did you confirm the correct approach? I have a project with the exact same situation and would love to know the outcome. Thanks,

Marcus Sheffer

LEED Fellow

7group / Energy Opportunities

LEEDuser Expert

4454 thumbs up

Mon, 06/23/2014 - 18:24

The project did not happen so we stopped looking into it. Anyone else do one of these projects?

Dave Hubka

Practice Leader - Sustainability

EUA

LEEDuser Expert

510 thumbs up

Mon, 06/23/2014 - 21:00

We have modeled manufacturing facilities in which there is a Central Utiltiy Building (CUB) onsite that houses the boilers/chillers/cooling towers. On one project we looked into certifying the CUB. The GBCI response to this same question was: For a central plant building, the energy consumption utilized to generate thermal energy (i.e., chilled water or hot water) for use in buildings outside the LEED Project Boundary does not need to be considered within the energy models for EAp2: Minimum Energy Performance. However, any heat gains from the central plant equipment, and the impact of these loads on the local heating and cooling systems of the central plant, must be accounted for within the models. Hope this helps.

Jon Clifford

LEED-AP BD+C

GREENSQUARE

LEEDuser Expert

261 thumbs up

Mon, 06/23/2014 - 21:21

We received similar guidance on our Hospital Campus project. We posed the question to the GBCI during the design phase so that we could incorporate the utility plant properly into energy models.

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