| Summary: | This paper investigates the energy performance of a building’s chilled water system (CHWS), primarily focusing on the systems direct electrical energy consumption and the potential for delivering improvements to increase the overall operational efficiencies of the CHWS. The CHWS supplies the cooling energy requirements of the RTE Television Centre’s Air Handling Units (AHU’s). This paper presents a detailed energy audit of both the current cooling energy load and the CHWS, while outlining a cohesive control strategy that focused on reducing the CHWS load by implementing free cooling methodologies for the building’s AHUs. The paper continues by presenting a descriptive analysis of the CHWS operational characteristics and the resultant energy savings achieved by the development of an innovative control strategy which allowed for demand-led modulating control of the CHWS. The result is an overall reduction in the operation of the CHWS of approximately 44% equating to an annual reduction in operational hours of 2956 hours. An overall energy saving of 691,000 kWh was made in the first year of operation between the CHWS and the AHUs.
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