Talking points:
- Georgia College began work on a project to nearly double the capacity of the campus chiller plant on Jan. 11, 2016.The expansion will not only bring better air conditioning service to campus, but also will bring it in a more energy efficient way.
- Quote: “A central chiller plant offers many benefits to a campus like ours. Instead of having many smaller chillers located in each building, Georgia College has a central chiller plant, which provides chilled water to a majority of buildings on central campus,” said Mark Duclos, director of facilities operations. “A centrally located system is typically more efficient and provides redundancy and reliability across the entire chilled water loop. Energy and maintenance costs are also typically lower than utilizing smaller, local units.”
- Quote from Mark Ducolos: “The chiller plant expansion will provide additional cooling capacity for our campus. If we had local chillers in each building and a unit fails, the whole building will be without cooling. A central chiller plant is ‘greener’ because it uses less energy to operate, typically 50 percent less, and takes up less space on campus.”
- The energy efficiency is not only with the chiller plant itself, but also with the solar panels that have been proposed for installation on the building’s roof. These panels will harness solar power to provide green energy to the facility.
- The project will cost an estimated $2.2 million and is funded by Major Repair and Renovation (MRR) funds from the University System of Georgia (USG). The MRR program is a capital renewal program for state-owned facilities of the USG, which is designed to help the USG maintain its physical plants, facilities and infrastructure.
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