With facilities totaling 1,000 buildings, achieving the University of California Davis’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2025 required ingenuity, innovation, and advanced data tools like AVEVA™ PI System™ and AVEVA PI Vision™. Three main sustainability initiatives—optimizing the chilled water system, improving HVAC scheduling, and switching from steam to low temperature hot water heating system—led to massive energy and monetary savings and ensured UC Davis is on track to meet its goal.
“We've achieved some of the more obvious efficiencies, but to reach our 2025 goal we need to go deeper. That increasingly requires things like user engagement, campus engagement, and optimization. In the last five years the use of real-time data and the PI System has become increasingly integral to our operations and our goals.”
David Trombly, Engineering Supervisor, UC Davis
Goals
- Use operational data to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025
- Improve HVAC scheduling and retrofit district steam heating
Challenges
- 1,000 buildings of different ages with diverse energy needs
- Self-subsisting budget (energy savings must pay for initiatives)
Solutions
- AVEVA™ PI System™
- AVEVA PI Vision™
- AVEVA™ System Platform
Results
- 62% reduction in gas usage
- Projected $197M in savings over 60 years
AVEVA PI System has also helped the university’s researchers make new data-driven breakthroughs. Researchers at UC Davis’s Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Sciences, for example, have used AVEVA PI System to monitor and improve fermentation in the winemaking process.
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