San Diego State University
San Diego State University (SDSU) located in San Diego, California, has a single HSL unit working in tandem with eleven two-bulb fluorescent lights and five incandescent lights in an open office area and a hall way. The building houses the SDSU Physical Plant personnel, whose mission is to provide an optimum learning, teaching and working environment for all students, faculty and staff within our campus community and to support the programs which sustain the educational mission of this university. They seek to achieve this goal through teamwork, foresight and innovation in caring for the physical environment of this campus and by fostering its continuous improvement. The Physical Plant personnel ensure that SDSU provides optimum learning, teaching and working environments for students, faculty, staff and visitors to the campus.
SDSU is probably one of the leaders in enabling and using "green" technologies. At present they have two demonstration projects on solar energy. The first is the Hybrid Solar Lighting system described on the web site.
The second project, a Concentrated Photo Voltaic (CPV) array is partially installed on the Physics Building and is going through testing and improvement in its first real world application. We were one of about 20 campuses that were vying for the demonstration and we were the successful party because we were ready to move now. We will have a total of 15 KW installed here at SDSU with 7 of those going to remote research sites with the Department of Sciences.
SDSU has a 14.3 MW cogeneration plant that provides almost 100% of the power requirements for SDSU as well as heating and cooling via 1800 tons of absorption cooling and 10,525 tons of centrifugal chilling. Our plant efficiency averages at about 70% and for the fiscal year 2005/06 we saved approximately $2,000,000 over purchasing from the utility. The important thing to note is that we have to burn gas to heat and cool the campus and through the Cogeneration we accomplish both heating and cooling and providing electricity to the campus. What this does, in effect is to lower our carbon footprint and help the region by offsetting the power that has to be purchased from generators or building new plants. The average utility generator is 35% efficient. Part of the mix of generation on campus is 120 KW of PV currently installed at Extended Studies Center, Music, West Commons, Parking Structure 1, and Physics.
Staff and students alike at SDSU appreciate high quality lighting like that provided by HSL. An ongoing project to save energy and improve lighting quality is the re-lamping of Parking structures to T8 fluorescents 5000K lamps (the higher color temperature lamps provide improved color rendering).