District Energy System

UNM Utility Services manages a campus District Energy System (DES) that can generate enough low-cost electricity to supply 50–70% of the main campus’s needs, steam for heating, chilled water for cooling, and enough compressed air for the UNM campus.

UNM’s on-campus Ford Utilities Center has two natural gas cogeneration units (Combined Heat and Power) that help produce 145,000 megawatt hours (MWh) per year of electricity. These units capture and reuse the waste heat for heating the main and north campus buildings. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), by capturing wasted heat, cogeneration systems can achieve efficiencies of over 80 percent, compared to 50 percent for typical technologies such as conventional electricity generation with an on-site boiler. This system helps UNM lower greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants.

The Ford Utilities Center earned UNM a 2008 Energy Star Award from the EPA. This award is given to projects for “efficiency and fuel savings and making outstanding contributions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from energy generation.”