GUILDERLAND — Fred Tresselt is often called the energy czar of the Guilderland School District but he prefers to think of himself as the energy whisperer.

Under his leadership over the past year, the district has saved over $483,000, a 21 percent savings in energy costs. The large savings comes from a series of very small savings as staff members change their habits, for example, turning off lights before they leave a classroom or unplugging unused equipment.

At Tuesday’s school board meeting, Tresselt was presented with an award from Energy Education, Inc., the Texas company that Guilderland contracted with to achieve the savings.

Tresselt shared the award with Tim Martin, representing custodial workers; Terry Andres, representing maintenance workers; and Chris Claus, president of the teachers’ union.
"He’d like to have a thousand people here, the entire district," said Neil Sanders, assistant superintendent for business, as he presented the plaque.
Charles Fasnacht III, president of the Northeast Division of Energy Education, told the board that the "out-of-the-gate" award, called the Energy Pacesetter Award, which Guilderland received, had been given in his district only five times over the last two years.
"It’s a team effort," Fasnacht told the board. "Everybody becomes part of the solution. Everybody becomes part of the energy savings."

Board President Richard Weisz said he hadn’t thought the district would achieve a half-million-dollar savings in the first year of the program; he equated the amount with a 1 percent tax increase.

Fasnacht told The Enterprise afterwards that his company has contracts with 796 school districts nationwide.

Asked if savings were now likely to level off, Fasnacht said savings are likely to increase as the years go by.

Asked if Guilderland had managed to save so much in the first year of the program because it had been wasting a lot of energy, Fasnacht told The Enterprise, "Absolutely not."

He went on to say that energy savings could come in three ways — from equipment, from buying energy wisely, and from getting people to change their habits. Guilderland had already done well with the first two, Fasnacht said, and his program fostered the third.

Environmentalist

In a program report prior to accepting the award, Tresselt outlined for the board the conservation measures the district had taken before starting the Energy Education program.

These included such things as energy management for shutdown and temperature schedules, using florescent fixtures and updating bulbs, installing LED exit signs, installing motion detectors so that lights shut off when no one is in a room, modifying timing for parking lights, and installing insulation and other energy-saving measures during building projects.

Tresselt outlined three primary goals for the energy management program — maintaining comfort and safety, saving money, and eliminating energy waste.

When the board was first considering the program, it was told that hiring a trusted energy manager was essential for success. Tresselt was then a teacher at Farnsworth Middle School who walked to work in the spring and fall and snowshoed or skied cross-country in the winter.

A math and science teacher, he had a long-standing interest in the environment. He has since retired from teaching after a 35-year career — 21 of them at Farnsworth.

Tresselt was a forestry major at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks and went on to study physical education at Brockport. He earned a master’s degree at Colby College in Maine on a National Science Foundation scholarship.

Tresselt was involved in many aspects of the district, having served on Farnsworth’s building cabinet and on the district’s technology committee. He knows the schools from a parents’ perspective, too, since his three children — now grown — attended Guilderland schools.

He and his wife have traveled extensively, teaching in Norway and Italy, and spending a year-and-a-half backpacking through Asia, through Turkey and India, down to Australia.
"Traveling overseas, you see how little energy is needed for a good life," Tresselt said.
He said at the time he was hired as energy manager, "A lot of people want to cooperate. They just need to be shown how."

Making changes

Tresselt told the board Tuesday that part of his job was auditing the buildings when they are unoccupied and monitoring uses when they are occupied.

He walks around the buildings night and day and listens to suggestions from Energy Education consultants, who are mostly engineers, Tresselt said. They travel the country and each offers his own insights, Tresselt said.

He also gets training at national seminars, he said, and meets periodically to exchange ideas with energy managers at other area school districts.
The first couple of times Tresselt visited school buildings as the energy manager, he said, he would hear, "I have to shut my lights off." But now, when he visits, Tresselt said, "They say the lights are off and just keep walking."

He also tracks and analyzes energy consumption for efficiency and he uses web-based tools and diagnostic loggers to track waste, he said.

Some of the things that have affected Guilderland’s energy use and cost this past year are rate increases, mild winter weather, and the middle-school additions. More space was added to Farnsworth, which increased costs, said Tresselt, but more efficient building materials were used, which offset increases.

Electricity rates increased 18 percent last year, Tresselt said; the district buys its energy through the OCM BOCES consortium.
Sanders said that the consortium provides leverage since it includes 100 different school districts. It is difficult to shop around, he said, because costs are "so volatile." The consortium’s philosophy, Sanders said, is, "We may not get the best price in one year, but we will over time."
"People did begin to turn things off and adjust," Tresselt told the board, after presenting a series of bar graphs charting consumption comparisons. He also said that he had "more behavior modification to do."

Finally, Tresselt went over the environmental benefits, calculating that, in the first year, the district had prevented emitting over 3 million pounds of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, which equates to removing 285 cars from the road or planting 590 acres of trees.

Guilderland has a four-year contract with Energy Education. The program costs average $150,000 for the first four years, which Sanders described earlier as being broken down this way:

— $120,000 for the consultants and training;

— $23,000 for the salary of the energy manager;

— $3,000 for the annual seminar travel expenses for ongoing training; and

— $10,000 for the first-year payment on energy-accounting software with a $1,000 annual maintenance fee thereafter.

Tresselt concluded his presentation on Tuesday by crediting the custodial staff, the maintenance mechanics, the educational staff, the maintenance supervisors, the district office personnel, and the Energy Education consultants.
"All in all," said Tresselt, "the program worked quite well. These are the people that made it work."