City Of Tulsa Using Stimulus Dollars To Go Green

By Emory Bryan, The News On 6

TULSA, OK -- The City of Tulsa plans to use stimulus money to create energy savings, thanks to an almost $4 million energy grant.

The first, and biggest, single project will be at the OSU Medical Center.

The city has a stake in what happens at the medical center because it's a public trust and handles a lot of the city's indigent patients. So any money saved there, helps the hospital, and the city.

Deep underneath the OSU Medical Center, chillers provide cold water that feeds the air conditioning system. The problem is they're decades old, inefficient and need major upgrades. OSU will be able do the work with a federal stimulus grant of $1.4 million.

"This grant will be a tremendous help to us, to offset capital improvements we're going to need anyway for the hospital. And it also saves energy, so it's been very helpful to us," said Jan Slater, CEO OSU Medical Center.

The grant will help the hospital replace older inefficient light fixtures through the building. It's work OSU had planned to do eventually, but doing it now will make the savings come faster, without spending money that could go to other projects.

The grant money will pay for new lights in surgical suites, where these high quality lights burn lots of electricity and create a lot of heat. New LED models provide higher quality light and use 38% less electricity.

"So the goal is kilowatt hours of electricity saved, greenhouse gas emission prevention and cost savings," Patricia St Germain, with the Department of Energy, said. "A 38% reduction in energy, that's a huge bit of extra cash they could do something with at the hospital."

The biggest single project at the hospital is the heating and cooling upgrades. While the upgrades will cost taxpayers $1.4 million, the hospital figures the payback in savings will take just a few years.

"To help them with some lighting retrofits, some chiller, boiler upgrades, we hope to save them about a quarter of a million dollars a year in electricity," Brett Fidler, the Tulsa Director of Sustainability, said.

This is the first of eight projects the city hopes to complete with the federal stimulus grant.  Another one is the retrofitting of some of the highway lights that have been turned off because of budget cuts.  The city wants to replace those with more efficient bulbs that the city can afford to turn on at night.