Chilled Water and Steam Use Is our project eligible for innovation credit(s) for taking steps to reduce energy costs, increase reliability and shift peak electrical loads by taking the following steps: a. Chilled water: The City partnered with the local utility by leasing back to the utility 5,000 tons of existing chiller plants residing in City facilities, there to be integrated with the utility\'s own 8,750 toms thermal storage plant. Since the City has a chilled water loop in place, the utility is free to dispaatch the most efficient plants to provide cooling to any point on the loop. The decentralized chillers provide a substantially increased level of confidence and reliability for the system. In addition, by combining plate and frame cooling in the City\'s plants and the utility\'s thermal storage plant allows a significant electrical load to be shifted from peak to non-peak periods. This enabled the City to negotiate low rates for an unregulated commodity, an important benfit to the City\'s taxpayers. b. Steam: For many of the same reasons, the City also partnered with the local utility to provide steam through the City\'s district system, resulting in sizable savings in taxpayer dollars in operating costs and capital cost avoidance.
The strategy described appears to essentially be an outsourcing of a thermal storage system. Rather than expending capital to obtain the thermal storage functionality, the City is paying for this functionality through a leaseback arrangement, providing generation capacity to the local utility. The approach may improve reliability, but that is outside the realm of LEED criteria at this time. LEED recognizes that shifting demand to off-peak periods generally reduces the overall capacity necessary to serve the community. Peak demand reduction is an important energy strategy because it reduces the need for additional power plants. This strategy is appropriate for an Innovation Credit. Submittals for the credit should include: documentation linking the building to the chilled water loop, a system narrative, and an analysis demonstrating that operation of the system results in significant reduction of peak loads. If the application cannot establish a direct capital budget linkage between the project and the district system, the approach is not eligible for an innovation credit. As you suggest this approach might improve the efficiency of the district thermal storage system, but it does not appear guarantee it. Nor does it appear to guarantee that the City project will receive chilled water from equipment that meets the minimum prerequisite requirements of ASHRAE 90.1-1999. This issue should be addressed in the application narrative.