CASE STUDY
University of Mount Union
Location: Alliance, OH
The Client
The University of Mount Union is a private liberal arts college in Alliance, Ohio. It was founded in 1846 and the campus currently has 52 buildings to accommodate their 2,253 students. As for facilities, each building across campus houses their own central plant with a wide variety of building automation systems managing those plants.
The Challenge
Mount Union had a desire to develop an energy master plan across their campus, as well as implement a green revolving fund. A green revolving fund is an internal fund that provides financing within
an organization to implement energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other sustainability projects that generate cost savings. However, the university had limited insight into the performance of their buildings.
The Solution
To begin, Mount Union hired Plug Smart engineers to audit two of their buildings, Bracy Hall and Miller Hall. Our energy audit yielded 14 individual energy conservation measures across these two facilities including LED lighting upgrades, energy management system modifications, boiler plant replacement, fume hood control modifications, and more. We developed a plan for the university to implement a campus wide green revolving fund as a funding source for future energy efficiency projects – meaning the savings created by the updated facilities, would in turn pay for upgrade itself