Virginia Tech Electric Service delivers power to the Blacksburg campus and roughly 6,000 residential and commercial customers. Aggregating decades of siloed operational data is central to hitting its 2030 sustainability goals.
Virginia Tech is committed to long-term sustainability practices that support a better physical and academic environment for students, faculty, staff, and the surrounding community.
Unlike most universities, which serve only their main campus, Virginia Tech Electric Service (VTES) delivers electricity to the Blacksburg campus, the Corporate Research Center, and roughly 6,000 residential and commercial customers. That means VTES has to meet the dynamic needs of both the university and the local community, whether that's powering Lane Stadium for 65,000 fans on game day or keeping nearly 4,000 street and sidewalk lights running across campus and Blacksburg.
Virginia Tech's primary utilities sites are 601 Energy Drive and the Central Steam Plant, between Old Turner Street and Barger Street. The Central Steam Plant generates more than 943 billion BTUs of steam annually, supplying campus buildings with a share of their heat, hot water, and electricity.
Virginia Tech is also in the middle of renovating its chilled water infrastructure, installing three 3,000-ton chillers, two in the North Chiller Plant on Stanger Street and one in the Southwest Chiller Plant in the Duckpond Drive parking lot. The plan connects the North and Southwest Chiller Plants with four miles of new underground piping into one continuous chilled water loop, alongside stand-alone chiller systems already installed in campus buildings.
Integrating that chilled water system creates a real opportunity to optimize distribution and management holistically. But doing that well across a multi-building environment means aggregating data from operational technology platforms that have traditionally run in silos.
Control platforms aren't built to store large quantities of data. They're built for control. As vendors and end users realize the value locked in that data, control systems get pushed to double as historians and analytics platforms, with mixed results. Physically storing data on a control system, on control panels or a head-end server, eventually hurts the system's own performance. Most control platforms also store data in relational databases like SQL, instead of the purpose-built time-series databases that handle huge data volumes far more effectively. Widening access to control systems beyond operators adds operational risk too, from license seat juggling to under-trained staff accidentally modifying or deleting parts of the system.
Campuses everywhere are working out how their critical infrastructure fits into their broader sustainability goals. Virginia Tech is at the front of that group.
Hitting big, far-reaching environmental goals takes an ambitious plan and an experienced team to execute it. Virginia Tech is using this moment to rethink how it plans, designs, implements, and continuously optimizes its critical infrastructure, with shared data, systems integration, and analytics driving the approach. That data-first philosophy is what lets a campus this size realize efficiency and value in its systems that wasn't possible before.
Bridging the OT-IT divide isn't a one-time project for Virginia Tech. It's the foundation the university's entire 2030 sustainability roadmap is built on.
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