Southampton School Board Awards $3.2 Million Energy Performance Contract To Energy Systems Group

Ronkonkoma-based Energy Systems Group received the green light from the Southampton Board of Education on Tuesday night, December 15, to move forward with a nearly $3.2 million project expected to slash energy costs and boost performance in all district buildings.

Savings from the improvements — which include refreshed lighting and new HVAC rooftop units — will self-fund the bond over the next 18 years, according to Michael Ryan, account executive at Energy Systems Group, resulting in a $535,800 profit over the life of the project and an additional $138,000 in rebates.

“All of this work is geared toward energy savings,” Mr. Ryan said. “It’s gonna reduce the energy cost of the district by about 20 percent. It’s gonna save the district $195,000 a year, and we guarantee those savings. So if the district does not see those savings year to year, we simply cut a check for the difference.”

At a School Board meeting on December 1, consultant engineer Aldo Mazzaferro, director of technical services for ECG Group in Smithtown, signed off on the project, urging the board to award the energy performance contract to Energy Systems Group in a timely fashion, pointing to the proposed timeline.

“The contract signing around this period in December is critical,” he said, “so that we can proceed with the detailed engineering and get this up to the state and get into that cue, and make sure some of this major equipment can actually be upgraded in summer 2021 — things like the rooftop units that really need to be done in the summer.”

Over the next five months, Energy Systems Group will finalize the engineering and submit the plan to the New York State Education Department in May — a June start date for construction dependent on its approval. Superintendent of Schools Nicholas Dyno expressed concern over any delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which Mr. Mazzaferro said he does not anticipate, explaining that the cue is down from 50 weeks to about eight.

“I don’t have a crystal ball — I always refer to SED as a little bit of a black box,” he said, adding, “My only comment is over the holidays, typically people start to look at their summer construction and there’s a lot of conversations just like this, saying, ‘Oh, let’s get into the cue now for the summer.’ So we tend to see the cue balloon a little bit around this period, so all the more reason that we want to keep this moving.”

The scope of the project, which Energy Systems Group estimates will take no longer than a year to complete, will see LED lighting upgrades for over 3,000 fixtures throughout the district, creating an improved learning environment with proper brightness, temperature and color, Mr. Ryan explained. The improvements will also replace three rooftop HVAC units that are “right at the end of their useful life,” and digitize all building automation and temperature controls in the district, eliminating the pneumatic controls.

Additional items include refreshing the steam traps throughout the buildings, which will curb overheating, upgrading to walk-in freezers with temperature alarms, and installing plug load controls that will give Director of Facilities Marcus DaSilva and his team better control over extraneous power usage.

“I’ve been working very closely with both Aldo and Mike,” Mr. DaSilva said. “We’ve definitely done our due diligence and went through every square inch of every building, every nook and cranny of the district, identified areas that we’re falling short on that we can rectify. I don’t foresee any issues whatsoever. I’m really happy to get this project rolling.”