Our project is a university project that receives its refrigerants from a cooling plant owned by the local Thermal Energy Cooperative. This plant serves several buildings on campus, and utilizes a combination of CFC, HCFC and HFC chillers. The plant has HFC chillers using HFC-134a refrigerant with an annual capacity of 84,000,000 ton hours. Our building will require less than 350,000 ton hours of chilled water per year. We have asked the Thermal Energy Cooperative to base load our building with its HFC chillers. They have given us a signed agreement that says they will allocate at least 350,000 ton hours of cooling per year for the building from capacity generated by their HFC chillers. Is a copy of this agreement substantial documentation to meet the pre-requisite as well as serve as part of the documentation for EA Credit 4.0 Ozone Depletion?
The agreement to "reserve" CFC-free capacity is not sufficient to capture the prerequisite. The prerequisite requires a phase-out of CFCs if they are present. While the proposed strategy is a creative way to link the building with a non-CFC/HCFC cooling system, there is no way to tell if the agreement will affect future equipment selection and contribute to the LEED objective of CFC phase-out. If the central plant has a plan to phase out CFC-based equipment, this would demonstrate that your agreement will be effective into the future. Determine if this is the case and provide documentation that the cooperative is moving in this direction. This phase-out plan should be part of the documentation for the prerequisite. Together with the HFC base load agreement, this would meet the intent of the prerequisite. The EA credit 4.0 issue is more involved. As mentioned above, the reviewer has no way of knowing if your agreement simply pushes a cooling load equal to the size of your building onto the CFC or HCFC equipment at the cooperative. The LEED Reference Guide is very specific that for buildings served by a central cooling plant, ALL equipment must be HCFC free. (See page 153 of LEED Reference Guide, Version 2.0) This credit would not be applicable to this project. Applicable internationally.