Best Energy/Industrial: North Carolina State University Centennial Campus TES
To reduce the university’s energy costs while avoiding the capital expenditures needed to expand the existing energy plant’s cooling capacity, the design and construction team delivered a 3.5-million-gallon chilled water, thermal energy storage tank in May 2020. Under its current rate structure, the university pays local utilities more during peak times. The TES allows 25,000 ton-hours of compressor load to be generated during off-peak times, then discharged during on-peak hours.
While the design called for installing 166 H-piles to a depth of 45 ft, subsurface soil conditions required that many piles be driven to a depth of between 65 and 70 ft. Each extension required a field-engineered solution to be approved by the engineer of record. The extensions required partial removal of the existing pile, welding on additional length of steel and reinstallation.