SJVCEO hopes that everyone had a safe and fun Halloween this year. We hope that everyone was able to avoid many of the energy vampires that occur in the home during this spooky month. The SJVCEO staff has been very busy helping all of our partners with steering clear of those vampires. We have been busy with our south valley partners as well as our north valley partners.
For our south valley partners the VIEW Partnership has been very busy with continuing to benchmarking energy usage for all buildings. The Partnership is also very happy to announce that the City of Visalia achieved gold tier status in the energy leader partnership (ELP) with Southern California Edison. We cannot wait to announce our other partners that achieve this status in the coming months. Achieving the gold status in the ELP model is a very large achievement. For a partner to achieve this status they must lower their energy usage, complete energy awareness outreach as well as approving an energy action plan. To all of our partners; continue the great work! The Partnership was also on the road for the Local Government Commissions Central California meeting that happened in Paso Robles. This was a great event that showed how local government partnerships are doing more with less. Doing more with less was the main theme for the meeting. It was also great to get together with the IOU partners and other peers to check in and hear everyone's progress.
As for our north valley partners the municipal energy tune up (METU) program they are continuing to be benchmarked with energy projects in sight. Our METU team has also been on the road for much of the month of October going to training's on new emerging technology. The first training was on programmable logic controllers (PLCs). These items are most often used in industrial, manufacturing and wastewater treatment applications, and can improve operations considerably by automating processes normally done by hand or to allow for another point of data collection to determine if a process is working effectively and efficiently. The second training was on designing thermal energy storage (TES). TES tanks work as a battery for your air conditioning by “charging” a large tank by creating ice at night, when there’s low or no demand charges, and “discharging” it in the daytime so chiller(s) don’t have to run during the daytime. The technology first debuted in the 1980s, was fraught with problems, but is now matured to the point that utility incentives for the technology are at a whopping $875 per kW permanently shifted. In some instances, especially when designing new buildings, installing thermal energy storage can be a lower first cost than just using nothing but chillers.
As you can see SJVCEO has been busy during the past month. We are always happy to stay busy when it comes to saving our partners and communities energy sand money.
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