Overview of the Texas LoanSTAR Monitoring Program

Abstract

The Texas LoanSTAR program is an eight year, $98 million revolving loan program, funded by oil overcharge dollars, for energy conservation retrofits in Texas state, local government and school buildings. The program began in 1988. Public sector institutions participating in the program must repay the loans according to estimated energy savings from an energy audit. This paper provides an overview of the monitoring program at Texas A&M University, the prime subcontractor to the Texas Governor's Energy Management Center on the LoanSTAR Program. As part of this program, a statewide energy Monitoring and Analysis Program (MAP) has been established. The major objectives of the LoanSTAR MAP are to: 1) verify energy and dollar savings of the retrofits, 2) reduce energy costs by identifying operational and maintenance improvements, 3) improve retrofit selection in future rounds of the LoanSTAR program, and 4) initiate a data base of energy use in institutional and commercial buildings in Texas. Currently, the program is monitoring hourly data from over two dozen building using public domain polling procedures that collect information from microcomputerbased field recorders supplied by several manufacturers. Future efforts will include investigating the feasibility of reducing energy monitoring costs by utilizing Energy Management and Control Systems (EMCS)-based monitoring and expand the program into additional sites.