Obama pledges to overhaul federal facilities

President-elect Barack Obama sounds as much like a facilities manager in chief as a commander in chief. Twice last week he pledged to modernize more than 75 percent of federal buildings to make them more energy efficient. In a December radio address, he discussed the need to replace old heating systems and to install more efficient light bulbs.

Uncle Sam is the single biggest energy consumer in the nation, so Obama's focus on federal facilities is understandable. Still, for a man inheriting two wars and a shattered economy, his comments have surprised and delighted federal building engineers and others who toil in the usually overlooked world of facilities management.

"There was a lot of excitement to hear the president-elect say the first thing on his list of infrastructure investment is to improve the energy efficiency in federal buildings," said Kevin Kampschroer, acting director of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings.

The office, which was established by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, is part of the General Service Administration's Public Buildings Service. GSA has considerable clout in the construction market as it owns or leases more than 352 million square feet of office space in more than 8,600 facilities nationwide and spends more than $1.2 billion in construction funds annually.

The devil is always in the details, and no details have been released yet about the Obama administration's plan to modernize federal buildings. Nonetheless, Kampschroer and other senior managers have a few ideas.

"You have to first recognize two things," Kampschroer said. "First of all, we've been working on energy efficiency in federal buildings for over 30 years. If you look at GSA's building inventory compared to the private sector inventory, we're already about 22 percent to 23 percent more efficient than private sector buildings," Kampschroer said.

Agencies now are required to cut energy and water consumption by 30 percent by 2015, and the 2007 law further requires them to reduce fossil fuel use in new and renovated buildings by 55 percent by 2010, and 100 percent by 2030.

It's a daunting task in large part because agencies already have done so much to cut consumption. "You don't have the kind of low-hanging fruit" that would yield dramatic results quickly," Kampschroer said. For the most part, agencies long ago replaced incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent bulbs, for example.

"That said, there's plenty of changes in technology and plenty of changes in understanding about what can be achieved in buildings that give us opportunities today," Kampschroer said.

Better lighting design and control systems could cut anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent of energy, he said. For example, a well-designed system would incorporate sensors to adjust light output automatically based on the amount of sunlight coming through windows and whether employees are at their workstations. Lights in hallways and restrooms would be activated only when people were using those spaces. Task lighting could be adjusted to suit employee needs and preferences.

Another way energy use could be improved is through installing advanced meters, which measure energy consumption on an ongoing basis. The Navy currently is implementing advanced metering at facilities nationwide. Bill Anderson, an engineer in Port Hueneme, Calif., who manages the service's advanced metering infrastructure project, said the program will yield significant dividends in energy savings by giving building engineers critical data about consumption that they don't currently have. The visibility will allow them to see where energy losses occur, manage outages more effectively, reduce demand at peak times and generally operate much more efficiently.

"We simply do not have the tools to have this level of granularity now with our current 'dumb' meters," Anderson said.

GSA uses advanced metering in the Washington metropolitan area, where its large inventory of federal facilities is a major consumer of the local electricity supply. With data from the advanced metering system it quickly can reduce electricity use during peak periods to avoid local brownouts, said Kampschroer.

"Advanced metering capability allows you to do a tremendous amount in terms of monitoring what's going on in the buildings [being metered]," he said. If the electricity grid becomes overextended, a central building engineer can put out a call to all the buildings in the network to reduce demand, and then he or she can watch the meters to see how quickly building managers comply with the order.

Through advanced metering, GAS has discovered cases where people were stealing electricity from the agency, Kampschroer said. GSA also has discovered places where certain efficiency controls were bypassed, either intentionally or inadvertently. "You get a tremendous amount of information that definitely results in energy reductions," he said.

Advanced metering also can help agencies address the industrywide shortage of engineers qualified to operate increasingly complex buildings. Dozens of facilities can be linked allowing a single engineer to oversee management. "You could never afford that skill level on a building-by-building basis," Kampschroer said.

Chris Tindal, deputy director for renewable energy in the Navy's energy policy office, said service officials are optimistic that the Obama administration's economic stimulus package will include money for other long-deferred projects that could substantially improve energy efficiency at military bases.

"We have a big laundry list of things that are not efficient that we want to upgrade," Tindal said, citing things such as outdated heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Many of those energy projects could be executed almost immediately if the funds were available, he said.