With rapid campus growth, as well as a new 100,000-square-foot College of Business and Economics (CBE) building in design, California State University (CSU) Fullerton was faced with the challenge of meeting additional heating and cooling needs with an inadequately-sized central chiller plant and limited capital funds.

CSU Fullerton selected AECOM to develop and implement a comprehensive design-build energy retrofit project that would produce a positive cash flow to enable the campus to install a new Central Utilities Plant (CUP) to serve the campus’ current and future heating and cooling needs.

The $43-million project delivered much-needed equipment, system and infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate the campus’ growth while also enabling the campus to comply with the state’s aggressive energy reduction goals. To ensure that we developed a bundled project solution that met all of the campus’ goals, AECOM developed an energy master plan and reviewed various scenarios and project options with the campus during initial project development. To help accelerate some of the anticipated project benefits, AECOM developed a two-phase project implementation strategy so that we could rapidly implement the less-complicated projects while finalizing the development and design of the more complicated projects such as the tri-generation plant.

 

Project Highlights:

      • Built a new 7,500-square-foot tri-generation plant
      • Retrofitted the exiting CUP with a consolidated steam boiler plant
      • Interconnected the College of Business and Economics to the new central heating and cooling loop
      • Installed new sewer piping at the CBE and interconnected it to the city service
      • Upgraded to pneumatic controls, chilled and hot water piping
      • Replaced aging and inefficient air-handling units
      • Installed a new 333-kW solar PV canopy system and a 65-kW solar PV off-grid system with battery storage
      • Installed Vending Miser controls