Taking a Peek at Pauley

By Abir Hossain and Jamie Liu

This week, Team Biodiversity joined the Sustainable Buildings team for their meeting with Michael Kung, the UCLA contact from SoCalGas, in which they were requesting help to conduct an energy audit of Pauley Pavilion. Unfortunately, Pauley Pavilion uses steam and chilled water for heating and cooling; natural gas use is filtered through the co-generation plant on campus. Because investigating Pauley Pavilion’s energy use would not result in any direct gas use savings, Michael mentioned that SoCalGas would have a hard time finding a financial incentive to conduct an audit.

For this reason, Mike offered to contact LADWP to ask if they would be willing to conduct an audit. If that does not work, he also offered to meet with his boss at SoCalGas and ask if she would be willing to fork out some cash to hire another third party that could conduct the audit. After some more discussion, the Sustainable Buildings team decided that they would speak to facilities management to gather more data and open up possibilities of payback plans. After gathering this data from the team, Michael would be able to bring in a third party; he will use this data to sell the audit idea to LADWP, which will hopefully peak their interest and help them see that there are potential benefits for them.