A.J. Ballard has a passion for finding new ways to make his buildings more resilient and efficient.
As energy manager for the Maine Army National Guard (MEARNG), Ballard wasn’t content with building envelope improvements and a solar photovoltaic installation at MEARNG’s Aviation Support Facility in Bangor, Maine. Instead, Ballard has pioneered the use of micro-combined heat and power (micro-CHP) systems in MEARNG’s facilities to cut energy costs and carbon emissions while improving resilience and redundancy.
Combined heat and power systems save energy and reduce carbon emissions by reusing the heat that is produced when generating electricity. Ballard worked with Dalkia Aegis, a manufacturer, developer, and installer of propane and natural gas micro-CHP systems, to design CHP systems for two of his facilities. The first, a 75-kW micro-CHP system at the Aviation Support Facility, demonstrated how much energy savings micro-CHP can achieve, says Dan Burke, vice president of sales and marketing for Dalkia Aegis.
“We know that it’s cut 30 percent of the facility’s energy consumption, creating about $60,000 of savings per year,” Burke says. The project, which won an Energy Star CHP award, served as a model for future CHP projects with the Army National Guard and specifically for MEARNG’s new Northern Maine Readiness Center (NMRC), a 45,000-square-foot facility in Presque Isle, Maine, serving the Army National Guard 185th Engineer Support Company.
Fueling CHP with propane
The Army National Guard has locations throughout the United States, and not all facilities have access to natural gas. MEARNG’s Aviation Support Facility and NMRC, for example, could not access natural gas to power the CHP system, so Dalkia Aegis designed the systems to run on propane. “Propane provides that resilience factor,” Burke says. “Even if there is natural gas, some of the facilities that are mission-critical could have both natural gas and propane. Our systems have the ability to run on both.”
The NMRC uses two 10-kW micro-CHP units from Yanmar as the primary heat sources for the low-temperature radiant slabs used in the building, as well as for domestic hot water. The micro-CHP units are tied together with propane boilers for backup heat, with the boilers kicking in automatically when additional heat is needed or if the CHP systems go down.
The micro-CHP system also meets a new directive from the Army to provide resilience and redundancy in its facilities by providing a backup power source. If the NMRC is affected by one of Northern Maine’s numerous outages caused by an aging grid or severe weather, the CHP units continue generating power to keep the facility’s administrative offices functioning.
While energy savings have historically been the primary driver for facilities looking at CHP systems, resilience and carbon footprint reduction have become more important in recent years, Burke says. Micro-CHP systems are so efficient they can heat and power a facility with fewer carbon emissions than relying on today’s power grid. Visit propane.com to learn more about how facilities can reduce their carbon footprint by implementing micro-CHP systems.
