FORT STEWART, Ga. - Fiscal Year 2010 was a very successful year from an energy conservation perspective. Compared to Fiscal Year 2009 Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Air Field was able to reduce the energy needed in its facilities by nearly ten percent. We are well ahead of the president's schedule for reducing energy consumption by 30 percent by 2015. Here at Fort Stewart, we are committed to meeting and exceeding the presidential goals without impacting the comfort and well being of the customers we serve and to do so in the most economical and practical sense possible.
The deployment of forces last year allowed us to mothball certain vacant facilities producing immediate energy savings across the installation. We continue to build out a new chilled water distribution system that will ensure adequate air conditioning services in many buildings that had never had proper air conditioning in the past while using much less energy than ever before. Our newly instituted HVAC maintenance program should also pay immediate dividends by improving systems reliability, especially in the hot summer months, while using less energy.
We expect that our wood fired boiler to come into full production by March. This boiler should save the installation nearly a million dollars per year and increase the renewable component of our energy mix to over 25 percent from zero at the moment. Our effort to properly regulate the hot water distribution temperature has cut our natural gas usage by 50 percent during the past quarter.
Even so we are continuing to look at ways we can save energy. An ongoing effort to replace building circulation pumps with new high efficiency replacements will save about 70 percent of electricity needed to run these pumps. This project will pay itself back in only three years.
Going forward a major effort will be placed in generating some of our own electricity using our wood fired boiler. This will increase our use of renewable energy; increase our energy security posture and save the installation up to two million dollars per year. We are partnering with private industry to explore ways to even further increase our energy security here at Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Air Field.
While the DPW and its engineers continue to evaluate and deploy new energy saving technologies we need your help now. Just by paying attention to the energy you use you can make an immediate impact. Turning off lights, reducing the heat and air conditioning while you are away and keeping windows closed while you are heating or cooling a room are some things you can do to help save energy right now. That energy saved will save money in our annual operating budget which can be used for other quality of life programs.
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