Case Study: University of North Carolina System achieves significant energy savings and automated HVAC control with EMS Software

University of North Carolina - Customer Case Study

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Union, which schedules more than 2,000 events and 10,000 meetings annually, faced wasted energy from running heating and cooling continuously across the building regardless of room occupancy. The operations team wanted to use their EMS schedules to stop conditioning empty rooms and better align HVAC with actual space use in their Johnson Controls Metasys system.

The Union integrated EMS with Events2HVAC to pull event schedules and send HVAC commands to 26 key rooms (about one-third of the building), and also switched to LED lighting. By reverting equipment to unoccupied settings between events, the project delivered large energy gains: cooling electricity 33% more efficient, heating electricity ~17% more efficient, chilled water 29% more efficient and steam ~6% more efficient—about $10,000 in electricity savings over eight months—despite only controlling a portion of the facility.

University of North Carolina System

Ken Miskow

Union’s Building Operations Manager