Stanford's Energy Management and Control System (EM&CS) is operated and maintained by Stanford's Energy Management Group. The Group is responsible for promoting, facilitating, and documenting energy conservation on campus. In addition to the EM&CS, functions include public awareness program development, funding and technical support for energy retrofit projects, utility demand management, and utility billing for Stanford provided utility service. The EM&CS shop is the primary location for system development and normal workday monitoring of building and utility system performance, but is only one of ten locations with operator work stations. Off hour monitoring is covered by the University's 24 hour dispatch and information center.

Stanford's EM&CS is a process control system used for control and monitoring of the Central Energy Facility Steam and Chilled Water Plants, monitoring of the Cogen plant, utility service entrance consumption and demand metering, utility demand management, central HVAC system control for Stanford's 80 largest buildings, monitoring of life safety systems, and local process control where needed. All system control logic development and programming, including new construction, is performed in-house.

Two vintages of Fisher-Rosemount (F-R) equipment are used. The Manager-16 system installed in 1981 still has about 3000 points connected. While incorporating distributed process control, data acquisition and operator interface is handled by one CPU, and the system slowed to where terminal updates can take as long as 20 seconds. In 1993 Stanford began an upgrade to the F-R RMV-9000 system which utilizes distributed operator interface processing. While we had hoped transition from the Manager-16 would have been completed by now, automation of the CEF, and Stanford's building program have allowed us time to only transfer about 500 points. Furthermore, the migration path was not as seamless as anticipated. The RMV-9000 currently has about 2500 points connected and is growing rapidly. The system currently provides one second updates from instrument to PC terminal, and we see no technical reason this should slow.

The RMV-9000 provides many optional levels of redundancy which we select on a case-by-case basis. The system consists of PC based workstations communicating over the campus ethernet system to four communication interface/data acquisition computers. These computers each support 16 multi-drop data highways to control computers. Stanford chooses to use the highways as redundant pairs. The highways can be configured for the F-R proprietary protocol, or several process industry protocols such as Modbus or Datanet+. Stanford typically uses F-R control computers as they can be programmed on-line from our central office, but we have also integrated equipment from Allen-Bradley and Moore Industries. Large buildings have a dedicated control computer; smaller buildings share a computer. The CEF has five control computers dedicated to 4 boilers, 9 chillers, 4 cooling towers, chilled water loop control and the thermal storage tank.