Liz Kirchner
To prepare for an influx of thousands of students in the next five years, the Virginia Tech master plan has outlined a wave of capital construction projects on the Blacksburg campus that include renovations to century-old buildings, laboratory revamping, and residential construction. To hold all this growth together, remarkable infrastructure upgrades will be made featuring a major multi-year capital renovation project that will upgrade to the university’s chilled water infrastructure involving three 3,000 ton chillers and roughly four miles of underground piping connecting the chiller plants in one continuous chilled water loop in an enormous centralized, energy-efficient chiller network expected to take about three years to complete.
Asked whether a chiller system is like air conditioning, Mark Owczarski, assistant vice president for university relations said in an email, “Sort of. It’s to cool buildings in the summer (steam heats the buildings in winter) and it’s to provide and regulate temperature environments essential for highly sophisticated research. In research, temperature is a key variable in many experiments, and you have to have the ability to create consistent temperatures (some of which can be extreme hot or cold throughout the year.”
That four miles of piping will be used to link the North and a Southwest plants indicates how large the Virginia Tech campus is, Owczarski said.
“To link the two chiller plants via pipes will increase the efficiency of the entire system. To connect them, the university plans to use existing roadways and existing pathways to place the pipe, so the lines my not be laid, in all cases, “as the crow flies” in straight lines.”
Owczarski describes the chiller plant near the power plant, its stacks visible from Main Street, as “a long-used utility” and ready for replacement.
A prominent goal of the upgrade is energy efficiency.
“Just like your home utilities,” he said, “none last forever and advances in energy efficiencies make older equipment more expensive (and more taxing on the environment) to run.”
The university web site says the project fills the need to meet LEED refrigerant requirements by replacing outdated, inefficient chiller equipment with equipment using newer refrigerant types.
He said that upgrades on aging infrastructure are essential over time, although some campus plants are younger, but could be upgraded as well.
While the project is out to bid currently and the arrival of the 3,000 ton chillers and their actual cost has yet to be determined, Owczarski says the estimate is about $40 million.
Owczarski said the new plants would be “Very, very much more” energy efficient especially for the aging chiller plant on the north east side of campus (near the power house).
“In the end, all these campus improvements are to increase the value of a Virginia Tech education by giving students and faculty the facilities needed to engage in learning and research projects,” Owczarski said. For more information on the chilled water upgrades visit: www.facilities.vt.edu/planning-construction/campus-construction-projects/active-projects/chiller-plant-phase-ii.html
