TTU Home

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.

Energy Use Index graph

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.



State Agency Energy Savings Program