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NARRATOR Your town or city is spending a lot of money on energy to power municipal buildings, schools, wastewater treatment plants, and other
facilities. To help reduce what you're spending, Connecticut now has an innovative program that you can use to complete energy efficiency upgrades
with no upfront costs. The State's energy savings performance contracting program provides support for cities and towns.
Stamford and East Hartford lead the way by successfully using Energy Savings Performance Contracting before the State's program was developed.
MICHAEL WALSH East Hartford in about 2005 got going on an idea that we could catch up on some of this deferred maintenance by investing in
capital improvements that saved energy and whereby the energy that was saved, ultimately financed the capital improvement.
RICHARD KEHOE Saving money while saving energy just sounds like a great thing for any town. But the town counsel being the town counsel, was
skeptical.
MICHAEL WALSH Without an energy performance contract, East Hartford would not be in a position to invest $12.3 million dollars.
MAYOR LECLERC We are an aging community. The changes that needed to be made to experience the reduction in energy usage needed to happen.
NARRATOR As a result of this process, East Hartford has been saving more than $600,000 annually in energy costs. The savings is used to pay
the financing cost of the projects.
MICHAEL WALSH We financed it with an 11 year lease from the Bank of America.
NARRATOR Facility improvements included lighting retrofits, an energy management system, HVAC and burner replacement, and installation of
pool covers and solar panels.
ALBERT COSTA We are here at our Department of Facilities building and we're looking at a 10KW solar panel project right behind us. It's one
of many facility improvement measures that we have accomplished over -- over the past six years. We have done a pool cover, one at the high school,
and one at our middle school. The pool cover does surprisingly save us about $10,000 a year in chemicals and evaporation of heat.
MARIO TORRES In the past, every month and a half we have to order chlorine and CO2. After the cover was put in, we only order chlorine like
every six months and the boiler doesn't seem to be coming on all the time because it doesn't require to be heated constantly.
ALBERT COSTA We've accomplished a tremendous amount of facility improvement measures. A lot of items are not glamorous; they are
infrastructure improvements that are vital to getting operational costs under control. It's clearly been a success story for the Board of Education
in East Hartford as well as the town.
NARRATOR Through Energy Savings Performance Contracting, the City of Stamford is able to save more than $720,000 per year in energy costs.
Some of the City of Stamford's energy efficiency upgrades were lighting and lighting controls, replacement of boilers and hot water pumps, and the
installation of an energy management system.
NANCY PIPICELLI In 2002 we entered into a performance contract for 14 of the Stamford Public Schools for $6.1 million dollars.
LOUIS CASOLO This was basically a year and a half project, which the larger aspects of the project were done in the summertime. That would
be the least disruptive to the schools. And other work such as the lighting retrofits were done in the evening hours.
NANCY PIPICELLI And throughout the school we replaced numerous T12 lamps with T8 technology. We also replaced numerous incandescent cans
with compact florescent lights and we also replaced exit signs with LED exit signs. The energy savings from this school alone in lighting was
$39,000 a year back at the 2002 rate of 10 cents a kilowatt hour.
We're here in the boiler room of Cloonan Middle School. All three boilers were replaced. We had four sets of hot water heaters as well as the
hot water pumps for the boiler system were replaced. We also installed a new boiler control panel.
AL HOYT We used to start out Monday mornings with wooden wedges and we controlled the fresh air dampers in which in turn controlled the heat
and cooling in the classrooms to satisfy the rooms and the kids. And now it's all done on a computer, which is much more efficient.
NANCY PIPICELLI The performance contract was financed through a third party lease agreement for ten years at 4.35%. We also refinanced that
lease to a lower rate after a few years. I think our performance contract was very successful and we are saving more energy than we anticipated and
we will into the future.
NARRATOR If your town or city would like to get started on Energy Savings Performance Contracting, the State's program will provide technical
support, financing advice, a set of standardized contracts, and a list of pre-qualified vendors. Contact us or visit Connecticut's Lead by Example website.