Idaho Office of Energy Resources
322 East Front Street
P.O. Box 83720
Boise, Idaho 83720
Phone: (208) 287-4891
Fax: (208) 287-6713

Idaho K-12 School Efficiency Project

The Office of Energy Resources (OER) has committed over seventeen million dollars of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) State Energy Program (SEP) funds to K-12 existing school building energy efficiency upgrades. This project will secure savings through a combination of building process changes, mechanical system tune-ups, and the installation of hard measures implemented through building envelope, lighting, mechanical and water savings retrofit. The training will be designed to support the most efficient and effective implementation of both the tune-ups and hard measure installation.

It's estimated that implementation of the K-12 project will either create or help to maintain 150-250 jobs in the Idaho market over the next two year period. A secondary benefit of this project is to make these jobs sustainable in the longer term.

The Idaho K-12 Project has two very specific objectives; 1) to provide an HVAC tune-up for each K-12 classroom building in Idaho; and, 2) to choose effective K-12 statewide retrofits for funding. With approximately 5 million dollars for tune-ups, and 9 million for retrofits, the Project's number one goal is to save district's 10 to 20 percent on utility bills.

The project is off to a good start with a voluntary pilot program at Homedale School District. During July and August scoping audits were performed on the district's buildings and tune-ups were implemented. As a result of the system tune-ups the district can expect to pay about 18 percent less for energy this coming year than they paid last year.

During September ten engineering firms, selected through an RFQ, were provided training on performance of scoping energy audits. Audits will be performed on each of Idaho's approximate 703 classroom buildings. The purpose of the scoping audits is to help direct service providers to capture efficiency during the HVAC system tune-ups and to prioritize capital projects for use of the project retrofit dollars. Scoping audits will begin in October 2009 and run through April, 2010. Building tune-ups and retrofit measures will begin when audits are finished.

Last Modified: Friday, November 20, 2009