SPARK

Discoveries, innovations, and insights that illuminate the future of the built environment

Mission: Possible—Lighting solutions, changing more than just bulbs

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At McKinstry, our mission is to make every building we touch more efficient. “Mission: Possible” is a new monthly series featuring people and projects around the country that demonstrate our mission in action.

From the moment you wake up to the moment your head hits the pillow, there’s a constant in almost everyone’s life—light. Whether it’s natural or artificial, in your home or your office, incandescent or LED, light is always in our lives.

In recent years, much of the conversation around energy efficiency and lighting had centered on switching from fluorescent or incandescent bulbs to LED lighting. Understandably so, considering that LED lighting is more efficient, versatile, and lasts longer.

Efficiency in lighting is about more than just changing bulbs, however. This is exactly where McKinstry’s Lighting Solutions team comes in.

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How energy efficiency is powering the new University of Utah Health Science Campus

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By Erick Allen and DJ Hubler

The University of Utah (U of U) Health Science Campus houses nearly 4 million square feet of critical patient care, laboratory and educational space. In 2017, the U of U broke ground on several new cutting-edge buildings—totaling nearly 800,000 square feet—transforming the campus. The university realized that their existing chilled water plant didn’t have the capacity to meet the loads of these new buildings scheduled to come online.

The U of U Planning, Design and Construction (PDC) team studied how best to meet this new cooling load—either by adding new chillers at a cost of nearly $40 million, or by significantly decreasing the cooling load in existing buildings. Reducing the load in the existing buildings could be accomplished for less than $25 million and would also result in ongoing energy savings. The choice was clear, and the university set out to find a partner to help them design, build and execute these energy-saving measures.

The PDC team chose McKinstry as its partner, with a dual goal of reducing the load on the chilled water plant by at least 2,000 tons and saving enough energy in the process to pay back the capital used to fund the project within 10 years.

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