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​​​​​​Down Memory Lane with Kenny Floyd – Energy Efficiency

​William “Kenny” Floyd is the current Director of the Division of Environmental Protection (DEP). Since the 1980s, he has been working at the NIH in environmentally-focused engineering and chemistry positions, striving to make the organization more sustainable. We aim to capture his many years of wisdom and share them with you, starting with this article’s topic of energy efficiency.

“You couldn't go to the gas station every day,” Kenny recalls, “…people really conserved a lot in the 70s to try to reduce the amount of fuel that they need.”

Coming off of the heels of the 1973 Energy Crisis, the US was in a prime spot for being open-minded about increasing energy efficiency. In Kenny’s earlier days in the NIH, the focus for increasing energy efficiency was at a large, overhead level. During that time, the emerging solution was implementing energy setbacks – that is, sharply reducing the energy used by adjusting the thermostats during the night when the campus is less active and increasing it during the day when activity reaches its peaks. Much of the difficulty came from the envelopes of the buildings, which allowed for leakage and made setbacks less feasible.

“We did a number of setbacks in a variety of buildings and most of those ended up getting reversed,” Kenny grimaces. “Later on, we were able to more successfully implement setbacks, but it required some improvements to some of our systems in order to successfully implement.”

Other energy efficiency system improvements over the past few decades have included widescale updating of facility light bulbs and fixtures, conducting annual facility assessments on 25% of campus buildings (covering the entire campus in four years) and implementing a Building Automation System to control temperature at a macro-scale. Currently, the focus is shifting to implementing efficiency boosts to our Central Utility plant, namely through the usage of variable frequency drives. These drives are connected to our 6000-ton chillers and make it possible to use partial capacity of a chiller, greatly decreasing the energy needed to power up these machines.

In addition to focusing on the larger scale energy efficiency improvement projects, Kenny believes the brunt of future progress lies in the hands of labs and individuals.

“We're gonna have to look more closely at our research operations and look for ways to reduce the energy use.” He gives a knowing smile, “If you go in probably 90% of the labs on campus right now, you walk in any lab, you're going to find almost every piece of equipment turned on.”

Kenny believes increased energy efficiency has a twofold benefit. Firstly, it decreases pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, which would otherwise go on to cause environmental health problems, one of the very things the NIH works against. Secondly, it decreases operating costs, alleviating budget restrictions and increasing the possibility of allocating funds elsewhere.

To motivate us moving forward, Kenny leaves us with this:

“Energy conservation isn't the other person's job. We all have a role and we need to take it seriously. […] We all need to participate in trying to make things more efficient across the organization from an energy perspective and also from the ability to get the job done.”

For the full transcript, click here.

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