In a recent interview with Chiller & Cooling Best Practices Magazine, Tom Pagliuco, Executive Director of Global Energy Engineering at AbbVie and longtime tekWorx client, shared valuable insights on optimizing chilled water systems in pharmaceutical facilities – highlighting a successful implementation of tekWorx pharmaceutical chilled water optimization technology that delivered remarkable results.
Targeting HVAC for Sustainability Gains
With HVAC representing a staggering 65% of a typical pharmaceutical facility’s energy usage, optimizing these systems presents significant opportunities for sustainability improvements. As Pagliuco explains: “The Holy Grail for electrical energy savings with HVAC is to reduce the room air change rate… But another excellent way to achieve energy savings is by producing chilled water more efficiently.”
Advanced Process Control: The Key to Optimization
Pagliuco describes a hierarchy of control strategies for chilled water systems, with advanced process control representing the highest level of optimization. This approach “generates the right amount of chilled water and pumps just enough of it to meet the cooling load, and no more and no less.”
Case Study: Irvine Campus Transformation
At AbbVie’s million-square-foot Irvine campus, the company partnered with tekWorx to implement advanced supervisory control on their chilled water plant. The existing system, while well-designed, suffered from low delta T – a common issue that reduces efficiency.
By integrating tekWorx Xpress® system with the existing Building Management System (BMS), this pharmaceutical chilled water optimization project:
- Optimized setpoints including chilled water supply temperatures
- Converted to full variable flow operation
- Improved chiller sequencing
Impressive Results
The pharmaceutical chilled water optimization implementation “reduced annual energy consumption by nearly 4.5 MWh, resulting in a yearly savings of more than one-half million dollars,” cutting the campus’s total electric power usage by 8%. With utility incentives factored in, the project achieved payback in under six months.
“This project was a homerun,” Pagliuco states. “We’ve since adopted it as a best practice methodology for optimizing chillers at other sites in our facility portfolio.”
The success at AbbVie demonstrates how strategic optimization of existing chilled water systems can deliver substantial energy and cost savings without the need for complete system replacement – an approach that resonates across the pharmaceutical industry where energy efficiency initiatives must balance with stringent production requirements.
