Driving up a campus’s energy efficiency and slashing carbon emissions requires significant funding and specialized expertise in energy management. Higher education institutions are facing mounting pressures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to emerging policies, student-led sustainability efforts, and administrative mandates to lower energy costs. To bridge this gap, the City University of New York Building Performance Lab (CUNY BPL), supported by an award from NYSERDA’s Clean Green Schools Initiative, collaborated with facilities teams to establish a systematic, data-driven methodology: the CampusCoach program.
The CampusCoach Handbook: A Practical Blueprint
The newly published CampusCoach Handbook: A Practical Guide to Tuning Your Campus HVAC for Energy Savings serves as a step-by-step “how-to” guide. It leverages CUNY BPL’s extensive experience in utilizing data to coach building operators to optimize their central plants and HVAC systems.
The primary focus is on identifying no-cost and low-cost operational changes that typically offer a highly attractive return on investment. The strategies detailed in the handbook are fundamentally rooted in the Building Re-Tuning™ (BRT) methodology developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
Facilities managers can execute these optimization processes through one of three flexible team models described in the handbook:
- Internal Staff: Utilizing existing facility personnel to take the initiative within their own organization.
- On-Campus Collaboration: Engaging faculty members and students to conduct data analyses and share recommendations.
- Third-Party Coaching: Hiring external experts, such as CUNY BPL, to act as live coaches for campus operators.
Partner Pilots & Demonstrations of Success
The CampusCoach process was successfully pioneered, refined, and shaped alongside facilities managers and operators at the City College of New York (CCNY) campus to build the foundational program. Following this initial success, the initiative has expanded its impact and is currently working with four other partner campuses: College of Staten Island, SUNY Farmingdale, Pratt Institute, and SUNY Binghamton.
The core framework focuses on intense investigations of central plant operations and heavy-consuming HVAC building systems. Key components and metrics demonstrating success include:
- The BOCS Technology: Implementation of the Building Operator Coaching Solution (“the BOCS”), a technology that extracts data from the control network and formats it cleanly for coaching.
- One-Year Live Training: Testing and stressing adjustments across a full year to account for the unique demands of the heating, shoulder, and cooling seasons.
- Proven Impact: At the building level, the PNNL based re-tuning strategies applied through this framework have demonstrated an average reduction in energy consumption of 14%. Notable additional benefits include improved occupant comfort and a powerful educational experience for the participating facilities staff.
Cultivating the Next Generation: Student Involvement
One of the most noteworthy achievements of the CampusCoach framework is its integration into academic pathways. Upper-level undergraduate and master’s students are uniquely positioned to join campus project teams. CUNY BPL developed specialized Educational Training Materials (ETMs) and structured independent study guides spanning building science, HVAC controls, and data visualization.
Real-world student impacts from the pilot include:
- The SAMS Innovation: Two master’s students built the Student Access Monitoring Systems (SAMS) for their Capstone project. SAMS acts as a view-only mirror of the CCNY Building Automation System (BAS) on a separate computer, enabling students to pull trend charts for analysis without interrupting daily facilities operations.
- Bridging Internships to Careers: Student interns have performed vital energy usage calculations, conducted thermal lag experiments on chiller plants, and reviewed complex mechanical drawings. Highlighting the program’s capacity to build green-career pipelines, a former student intern (Ninad Kashyap) was successfully integrated into the project team as a full-time staff member at CUNY BPL upon graduation.
Get Involved
By turning complex data into actionable operational changes, the CampusCoach program fosters a permanent clean, green culture on campus while keeping operating costs down year over year.
For more information, to access training modules, or to find out how to launch this program on your campus, contact the CUNY BPL BRT team at bpltraining@ccny.cuny.edu.