Suwannee County School District installs real time Energy Management as part of it’s electricity cost reduction strategy. just like all Florida school districts struggle with shrinking state funding and budget cuts combined with rising expenses. Mark Carver facilities Director recognized that electricity cost reduction was simply the only expense you can cut without a negative impact. Eliminating electricity waste will reduce expenses, but where do you start?
Mark Carver reached out to vootu inc. a Florida based Energy Management company who specialize in electricity cost reduction, with a primary focus on always remaining budget neutral. This approach allows for no delays and maximum savings to be put in place so that the saved budget monies can simply be applied to finance the energy saving solution. Often the savings exceed the finance obligations and a very attractive cash positive situation is in place.
Mark Carver is no stranger to energy saving companies knocking on his door and his experiences had not led him yet to a company he felt comfortable could deliver the savings long-term he was looking for. Mark put vootu to the test with a smaller building that had historic electricity consumption data available. vootu audited the building, and presented their recommendations for improving efficiency and lowering costs by retrofitting all lighting to vootu LED technology, and the integration of V-Icool to their Air Conditioning units.
A further year went by as Mark compared the reduced consumption against previous data he had collected, the results after a full-year confirmed that vootu had both the ability to calculate accurate energy savings, and most importantly deliver on those savings.
Vootu initially installed their real time Energy Management systems (E-TRAQ) into all Nine schools to capture data that would reveal cost reduction opportunities, and also provide the much-needed energy baseline profile to showcase all improvements against. In the summer of 2018 vootu rolled out a full LED lighting retrofit of all Nine schools, together with the administrative and support buildings within the school district. Using the Energy management systems,in real time as the work progressed consumption reductions could be easily viewed. This then allowed for adjustments to be made to re balance the phase load disruption the introduction of LED lighting had created.
Mark Carver recently announced their historic annual electricity costs of $1.2M had fallen by $140K in the year following the LED retrofit. In addition to savings in electricity expense the district now has no annual maintenance expense typically associated with the upkeep of their legacy lighting systems. These further savings are backed by guarantees for at least the Five year warranty period vootu place on all of their LED lighting products. Taking into consideration both the electricity and maintenance savings produced by this program Suwannee County Schools will recover their entire investment in approximately three years, then continue to benefit from this smart decision made by Mark Carver to move into the modern era of energy efficient lighting systems monitored by real time energy management systems.
