To help offset a major portion of the project costs, the new plant is expected to provide Chaffey College with more than $12 million in energy and operational savings over the next 20 years.

"At Siemens, we work on the same side of the table with our customers to find creative and cost-saving solutions to their project needs," said Shaun Ayvazi, senior account executive, Siemens Building Technologies.

The new central plant will be the heart of the college's utility infrastructure, providing a chilled and hot water utility system from a central location on campus. The plant will be housed in a concrete building of about 10,000 square feet, containing two large boilers and chillers, cooling towers, pumps, piping, and energy management system controls.

To bring chilled and hot water, reclaim water, data, and electricity from the plant to the 20 campus buildings, Siemens said it will dig two miles of utility trenches in order to connect the piping necessary for distribution. Included in the trenching is a reclaim water loop, designed to allow the campus to use reclaimed water for irrigation purposes.

In conjunction with the trenching project, Siemens said it would build a fire access road across the campus to provide emergency vehicle access to all campus facilities.

In addition, Siemens will replace the Freon-based DX-carrying coils in existing air conditioning units with environmentally friendly chilled-water coils.

The project, which started in July 2005, is expected to be completed by September 2006, just prior to the start of the school year.

Chaffey College, one of the first colleges to be established in California, is a two-year public community college situated in Southern California. Its campus occupies 200 acres in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Founded in 1883 as a private college, Chaffey has been a publicly funded college since 1916 and is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Publication date: 12/12/2005