TAS Commissions Pepco Energy Services District Cooling Plant

Press Release  |  Mar 07, 2007

TAS has successfully completed commissioning of the 2,900 ton Pepco Energy Services’ district cooling central plant. The Pepco Energy central plant will provide comfort cooling to twenty (20) state government buildings in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.  Pepco Energy Services, a subsidiary of Pepco Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:POM), has entered into a twelve-year Energy Savings Performance Contract with the North Carolina Department of Administration.  Richard Beversdorf, Pepco Energy Service’s Manager of Project Development, and his team submitted the winning bid based on the innovative concept of a district-cooling loop with low temperature stratified water storage.  TAS has joined forces with Pepco Energy in designing and manufacturing the packaged central plant system with thermal energy storage to provide a new level of comfort cooling efficiency for the Raleigh complex.

Pepco Energy Services’ performance contract provides substantial economic and operational benefits to the State of North Carolina.  “The proven advantages of using a packaged cooling system in large tonnage applications, coupled with the ability to guarantee system efficiency, make TAS’ proven packaged central plant technology the logical choice.  In addition, Pepco Energy Services also benefited from dramatically reduced site time and construction labor cost.  Leveraging TAS’ modular, factory constructed manufacturing process helped mitigate inherent design and construction risk, which is frequently associated with projects of this magnitude”, commented Gary Hilberg, Vice President of Sales, TAS.
 
The TAS 2,900 ton modular plant features Trane’s low temperature, high efficiency centrifugal chillers which are integrated with a new 2.9 million gallon thermal energy storage (TES) tank.  An additional feature, which helps generate electric cost savings by maximizing energy efficiency performance using TES, is the plant’s control system.  The TAS control system limits the electrical draw from the grid during daily peak periods.  “The reduction in daily peak demand lowers the system’s operating costs and subsequently produces cost savings for the end-use customer.  The concept of shifting chilled water production to off peak hours and storing the chilled water for later use – next day’s peak demand – has both cost and environmental benefit”, said Mr. Beversdorf.
 
With any Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC), cumulative savings should pay for the project.  Given that an energy savings guarantee is integral to an ESPC, TAS' ability to guarantee system efficiency at commissioning helps Pepco Energy Services mitigate their financial risk.  “TAS Packaged Central Plants’ global experience in district cooling applications helped make TAS the natural choice for assisting Pepco Energy Services in delivering a high efficiency solution to the State of North Carolina”, said David Weiss, Group President of Pepco Energy Services.