Webinar - Could Alternative Cooling Technologies (ACTs) Provide ESCOs with the ECM-1 of the Future?

Description

The energy services industry has been a great public-private partnership story, providing comprehensive, self-funding facility upgrade projects for more than four decades. For much of this time, the savings generated by lighting and controls measures paid for the “stuff” that many customers were after – including HVAC measures with longer paybacks that didn’t “pencil” on their own. Going after lighting has been logical, it was the biggest electricity usage and was a technology whose efficiency improved consistently, leading up to the widespread adoption of LED technology. As for controls, continuous improvement in digital communications technology and OEM-installed controls has eliminated many of the high ROI measures that we implemented in the past. One result of all this progress on lighting and controls is that the Space Cooling share of the building energy use pie has gone up, in some buildings to the top of the list. Even as we continue to deploy LED lighting, we’re recognizing that it’s difficult to build a comprehensive ESPC project that interests a customer when you start with an ECM-3 simple payback. But is it possible to find an HVAC retrofit measure that can act as ECM-1, that actually pays for the “stuff” that customers want? Alternative Cooling Technologies (ACT) have the potential to deliver disruptive savings along the lines of LED lighting retrofits, and their development coincides with a moment where grid utilization is paramount. It is this same Space Cooling power demand that accounts for the current low grid utilization, so can we look to ACTs to deliver peak load relief through efficiency, and even through energy storage without the use of batteries? Can these technologies align with the needs of data centers and other emerging large loads? And can they deliver the resiliency that many ESCO customers are after? This presentation looks at the potential for ESCOs to leverage ACTs to continue to develop the types of comprehensive projects that are likely to get customers to “yes.”

Presenters: 

Adam Procell, Chief Commercial Officer, Blue Frontier and Matt Kruse, VP of Sales, Blue Frontier

Learning Objectives:

1. Understanding compressor-less cooling technologies and their ability to significantly reduce space-cooling energy use in non-residential buildings.
2. How to leverage desiccant dehumidification and indirect evaporative cooling to generate substantial HVAC energy cost savings in ESPC projects.
3. The cost-effective energy storage and resiliency potential of liquid desiccants used in air conditioning.
4. Driving down electricity rates for all customers by making space on the grid for large load end users.

NAESCO has submitted this webinar to the AIA for 1 CEU approval. 

NOTE: Beginning in 2023, all NAESCO webinars will be offered to all attendees at no cost. Recordings and slides will be available to members only, after the webinar.