Pomfret School finalizes two-year, $8 million power conversion project

School's energy-use transformation has become a model for other schools and towns

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Pomfret School Head of School Tim Richards viewing the plaque outside the School's newly refitted boiler room that reads, in part, "Pomfret's carbon footprint reduced by 50%"

POMFRET, CT (04/15/2013)(readMedia)-- By all measures, it was a huge "flip of the switch": On Monday, April 1st, Pomfret School marked the successful completion of its two-year, $8 million, oil-to-natural-gas, footprint-reducing Sustainability Project. With the simple flip of a switch and the careful monitoring of a laptop screen, the School's newly installed high efficiency gas-fired boilers began to quietly hum and rumble in tandem with its state-of-the-art cogeneration (cogen) equipment system. Not only will this result in a significant reduction of the amount of electricity the School consumes by nearly half, but that energy is now being self-generated.

With a huge nod to environments both local and global, Pomfret's Sustainability Project has become a reality. The project was designed and overseen by the New York City-based Fulcrum Group (best-known worldwide for the environmentally efficient Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park) whose designers and engineers collaborated with their counterparts at Connecticut's Yankee Gas. "The School is now generating approximately 40% of the electricity it uses," said Head of School Tim Richards. "The switch to natural gas will allow us to reduce our heating costs by two-thirds; and we will emit 40% less carbon than [when using] heating oil. We will now begin to [operate] with a combined efficiency of more than one and half times that of many commercial power plants." The project, he added, "has enabled Pomfret to remove 40% of the campus from the grid, thus reducing our carbon footprint even further."

The newly refitted boiler room has become, in effect, another classroom on the School's 119-year-old campus. Public works administrators from around the Northeast are already scheduling dates for tours and information sessions, to learn from what Pomfret has done.