Energy Management
Energy Efficiency at Texas Tech
It takes about 24 Million Dollars a year to illuminate, heat and cool the Texas Tech campus.
The required energy takes the form of electricity and natural gas, as well as steam and chilled
water from the Central Heating and Cooling Plants. Texas Tech Physical Plant tracks the use of
each of these utilities for every building on campus. As you might imagine, that's thousands of data points.
One way of managing all this data is to convert each utility into BTUs and then combine them
for the whole campus. By tracking how many KBTUs (thousand BTUs) are used for each square foot,
we get a measurable indication of how efficiently our campus is running. This KBTU/ft2 index is
called our EUI, Energy Use Index.
Our EUI for Fiscal Year 2009 was 182.4 KBTU/ft2. You can see from the following graph that
our energy efficiency has improved by 23% over the past decade even though both our campus
and student body have been growing.
We are currently on track to reach our 2010 goal of 180 KBTU/ft2.
In the coming months, watch here to see how you can help Texas Tech surpass its goal.