New York Presbyterian Hospital Improves Energy Performance

The Situation

New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH) has two major campuses in New York City, NYPH-Cornell (Downtown) and NYPH-Columbia (Uptown). Together they comprise more than eight million square feet of research and hospital space, and include an extensive grid of legacy utility plants. These plants provide utilities that include the

generation and distribution of steam, chilled water and electricity, allowing adjacent users like Cornell Medical School and Columbia University Medical School to purchase excess capacity via the loop buried within the streets of Manhattan.

The utiliVisor Solution

NYPH initially approached utiliVisor to get a better handle on the metering and billing of its energy services, but decided it was worth taking a closer look at the energy efficiency and cost effectiveness of its existing facilities as well, focusing on chilled water generation efficiency. The goal was to evaluate whether utiliVisor’s comprehensive web-based monitoring system and operations center energy analysts could create efficiencies and lower overall costs.

Given that utilities in a hospital setting are system-critical, working with NYPH posed significant challenges. Some of the buildings are over 100 years old and equipment included a variety of chillers with both steam turbine and electric drivelines as well as dual compressor centrifugal chillers with 4500 ton capacities. Steam was being generated from both a boiler plant and a cogeneration system.

Energy Saving Opportunities

When looking for ways that would allow NYPH to be most cost-effective, utiliVisor zeroed in on the chilled water plants. At the time, the generation of chilled water was costing the hospital in excess of $20 million per year. To evaluate the operation of the plants on both campuses industrial measurement devices were installed. All existing equipment was tested for accuracy and data from the various systems was pulled together in one platform with data routed from the system to a PLC master SCADA and pushed to the web every five minutes via ftp. Once all of the accurate data collection was completed, an analysis was done to understand how all the system components were working and determine the most efficient method of operating the plant.

Energy Oversight + Insight

Industry: Healthcare
Location: New York, NY
Central Chiller Plant: 12,665 ton (Uptown) 12,000 tons (Downtown)
Implementation: utiliVisor Energy Plant Services and Energy Metering Services
Annual Savings: Over $2,000,000