FE&P’s Mark Gardner and Eric Valentine earn board kudos

BY ARIE WILSON PASSWATERS
Rice News staff

With ever-rising energy costs, two Facilities, Engineering and Planning staff members are helping Rice curtail expenses and practice conservation by monitoring real-time energy use.

Both employees received special recognition at the Dec. 10 Rice Board of Trustees meeting. The board honored Mark Gardner, operations analyst, and Eric Valentine, energy management coordinator, for their development and implementation of business software to help analyze how energy at Rice is made and used.

	ERIC VALENTINE		MARK GARDNER

“While that information has been available, storing and cataloging the data in a useful manner required an enormous effort, which these guys have spent many hours successfully managing,” said Doug Tomlinson, assistant vice president for project management and engineering. “But the real leap in innovation by these two gentlemen combines real-time energy monitoring with historical data for a specific building based on actual time-of-day and day-of-week use, combined with weather and humidity conditions, to precisely determine what specific energy a building should be using at any given time.”

For most of the buildings on campus, Gardner and Valentine have built mathematical models to predict future energy use. This helps utility plant operators determine their equipment lineup for the day.

“While all this may sound obvious, it had never been done,” Tomlinson said. “The company that supplies our software has sent its engineers to Rice to learn from Mark and Eric how to build these predictive tools into their commercial software.”

With the data and predictive energy tools developed by Gardner and Valentine, this past summer Rice was able to leverage its existing cogeneration and firm capacity in air conditioning to participate in what the electric industry in Texas calls load share, where a company is paid to voluntarily reduce its electric load during peak demand.

Through this program, Rice had been paid more than $150,000 by CenterPoint Energy because of our ability to better manage our utility use, Tomlinson said.

“Mark and Eric have not only enabled Rice to save valuable energy and financial resources through their brilliant energy-monitoring systems, but the standards by which other institutions now strive are in place here,” Tomlinson said.

The board honored Gardner and Valentine with a plaque and a monetary award.