Achieving DOE Team Initiative Goals: Working with ESCOs

William Lintner, U.S. Department of Energy
Geoffrey Bell, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)

The Transformational Energy Action Management (TEAM) Initiative is a plan put forth by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to dramatically transform the Department's energy, environmental, and transportation management. The TEAM Initiative aims to meet or exceed the aggressive goals for increasing energy efficiency throughout the federal government. The TEAM Initiative will leverage every possible public and private resource to improve performance and reduce energy and water costs at DOE facilities over the next few years. The primary TEAM goals for DOE are to have all of its national facilities reduce their energy consumption by 30 percent and water consumption by 16 percent by the end of fiscal year 2009.

The TEAM Initiative has eight core goals:

• Reduce energy consumption by 30 percent and water consumption by 16 percent in all DOE facilities.
• Acquire at least 7.5 percent of all energy from renewable sources.
• Build alternative fueling stations at all sites by 2008, and replace all conventional fuel vehicles in the DOE fleet with alternative fuel vehicles by 2010.
• Attain a LEED® Gold standard on all new buildings and on all buildings that go through major renovations.
• Attain a LEED Gold Standard on 15 percent of all current buildings by the end of fiscal year 2015.
• Give preference to bio-based, environmentally friendly sources of energy and water, while reducing the use of hazardous and toxic chemicals and managing the production of waste.
• Develop best practice models for the use of third- party financing for energy saving projects.
• Improve the energy efficiency of all data centers by 10 percent by 2011.

To attain these goals, DOE will use Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC). ESPCs are contracts in which private companies finance, install, and maintain new energy- and water-efficient equipment in federal facilities. The government pays no up-front cost, therefore saving taxpayer dollars, and the company's investment is repaid over time by the agency from the cost savings generated by the new equipment. This allows the government to use the private sector to purchase more energy-efficient systems and improve the energy performance of its facilities at no extra cost to the agency or the taxpayers. A brief process outline follows:

• Contact a Federal Energy Management Program ESPC project facilitator
• Identify potential Energy Savings Companies (ESCO)
• Perform internal ESCO selection process
• Begin ESCO initial proposal (IP)
• Commence ESCO Detailed Energy Survey (DES)
• Receive ESCO final DES submittal
• Review DES for LBNL resolution
• Sign the delivery order contract

Biographies:

Will Lintner is the Department of Energy's project manager for the Labs21 Program. He has been the project manager since the inception of Labs21. With EPA's managers, he has guided Labs21 through a period of rapid growth to become an exemplary model of pubic/private sector cooperation and the premier organization dedicated to applying sustainable principles to laboratories.

Mr. Lintner has championed sustainable best practices, primarily energy efficiency, for over 25 years, first with the Department of the Navy and more recently with DOE. In 2000, he was recognized for his contributions to reducing DOE's operating costs by over $100 million per year through investments in energy efficiency retrofit projects. More recently, he has lead initiatives to spur facility managers to adopt best practices in their operations. Through these efforts, sustainable design and re-commissioning of buildings have become standard practices and DOE has come to lead the federal government in the number of buildings that are LEED-certified and the number of laboratories registered to be certified. Mr. Lintner is a professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is a graduate of George Washington University and George Mason University.

Geoffrey Bell is an energy engineer in the Environmental Energy Technology Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He is credited with a number of publications, including serving as a principal author of the Design Guide for Energy Efficient Laboratories. This publication is intended to assist facility owners, architects, engineers, designers, facility managers, and utility energy-management specialists in identifying and applying advanced energy-efficiency features in laboratory-type environments. Mr. Bell is a certified state energy auditor in New Mexico and a registered professional engineer in both New Mexico and California. He has served as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Energy, a teacher at the University of New Mexico, and an energy engineer contractor to Sandia Corporation, in addition to various other mechanical engineering consulting positions. Mr. Bell received his Bachelor of Sceince in mechanical engineering from Newark College of Engineering and a Masters of Architecture in Environmental Design from the University of New Mexico.

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