In a short video interview, Chris Angerame, vice president of engineering at utiliVisor, a leader in utility submetering and plant optimization, talks with facilities team members at Maritime College about current operational challenges, which include preparing for the delivery of Maritime’s new training ship while continuing toward Maritime’s clean energy and sustainability goals.
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Maritime College is a unique member of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Located just outside New York City, Maritime prepares its engineering students for the global marine transportation industry as well as landside facility operations through classroom, regimental/Coast Guard, and hands-on training. The new ship will help the college continue that mission since the current training ship, in use since 1989, will soon reach the end of its service life.
Adding another ship to its pier will require the college to bring in a new electrical feeder line from Con Edison to provide enough capacity to power the ship, as well as transformers to step up the voltage, new steam condensate pipe to heat the ship when docked, and potable water, sewer and data lines.
At the same time, the facilities team, which includes plant superintendent Rich Monahan and capital program manager Joe Tedesco and is directed by Bill Rueger, is carefully considering how the added load will affect SUNY’s sustainability plans. SUNY campuses account for 40% of all state-owned building assets in New York, and SUNY has committed to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gases from its facilities by 2030 and a reduction of 185 billion Btu via energy efficiencies by 2025.
The facilities team started Maritime’s sustainability efforts by installing submeters throughout its campus buildings. Submetering, or tracking energy usage behind the utility meter to determine consumption by service area, is key to finding inefficiencies and revealing meaningful energy decisions. Part of utiliVisor’s partnership with Maritime has been to assist in troubleshooting equipment and validating the accuracy of its submetering system.
“We knew from New York state initiatives like Executive Order 88 as well as BuildSmart 2025, we had to get a handle on [our campus electrical consumption]. We knew some buildings actually consumed more than others, but we didn’t have a handle on it,” said Tedesco. “Now we can actually see … which buildings are consuming more than others and what corrections we have to make via the building management system, or how we operate gearing usage around academic schedules. That’s our biggest plus as far as developing a plan to cut energy and facilitate usage of our environmental systems.”
Angerame, himself a Maritime alumnus (’06), is enthusiastic about being back on campus and sharing lessons learned with students as well as the administration and staff. “There’s only so much you can learn in the classroom,” he said. “Submetering is a powerful means to visualizing a full, accurate picture of energy consumption across campus. With that kind of granularity of information, everyone can see their impact on electrical load, which drives decisions about what can be done to change load profiles and begin implementing the changes that will help Maritime achieve its efficiency goals,” he said.