Danfoss - Drives boost energy savings at Natural History Museum
Initially, the South Kensington Museum Estate
Centralised Boiler House, installed in 1952 in the
basement of the Natural History Museum, used to
distribute heat to a number of adjacent museums and
colleges. In recent years, especially when the Science
Museum and Imperial College installed CHP systems, it
became clear that the NHM’s boiler house was over-large,
inefficient and in need of refurbishment.
Now, Vital Energi of Bolton are to guarantee to save the
Natural History Museum (NHM) £500,000 and 1800 tonnes of
CO2 every year over the next fifeteen years with their
first Energy Performance Contract. This £12 million
project will involve the finance, design, supply,
installation and commissioning of the necessary plant
and equipment to provide tri-generation of electrical
power and heating services to both the Natural History
Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum next door.
The work involved the removal of two of the boilers and
in their place the installation of a 1.8MWe gas fired
CHP engine, two 750KW absorption chillers to utilise CHP
waste heat for heating and cooling purposes and the
installation of two new cooling towers. Vital Energi
will also be responsible for the operation and
maintenance of the energy centre over the next fifteen
years.
In a complex the size of the NHM, it’s inevitable that
the various air and water circuits and sub-circuits will
require to be balanced and some method of control
provided to maintain that balance, otherwise the hot
water and cooled air would not be delivered to the
appropriate parts of the building. Traditionally,
proportional balancing was achieved using valves in the
water circuits and dampers in the air ducts but this
form of control is, at best, sloppy and inefficient.
Today, the use of valves has increasingly given way to
accurate, more efficient flow control by varying the
speeds of the fans and pumps delivering the air and
water throughout the building. As energy costs have
risen, so the cost per kW of VSDs has steadily reduced
and the economic case for VSD control has become
undeniable.
It’s for that reason that nowhere on this extensive
system has Vital Energi used regulating valves but
instead has installed Grundfos variable speed pumps and
16 Danfoss VSDs between 2.2kW and 30kW on all the
primary and secondary water circuits, under the control
of the museum’s existing BMS. As Mr Wonsbek explained,
“there’s little point in refurbishing a system to
improve its efficiency then to install control valves
which would merely drag the overall efficiency down
again. Even where there is no need for continuous
variable flow control, we have used variable speed pumps
to tune the system initially and these will then run
fixed at that reduced speed set point.”
Email:
uk.drives.sales@danfoss.com
Arundel Jones Associates Ltd
Hill Farm, Linton Hill, Maidstone, Kent ME17 4AL
Tel : 01622 745333
news@buildingdesign.co.uk
Registered in England and Wales No. 07334149
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