Lights, HVAC, Action!

Last summer, a small group gathered at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, Mingo County. It was early enough that fog still shrouded the mountains surrounding the tiny river town, and the museum was the first establishment to open its doors that morning.

A battered farm truck rolled up and discharged a sleepy posse of young folks. A crew of engineers arrived in an SUV and briskly unloaded equipment onto the sidewalk. The owner of the local inn strolled down the street, into the museum, past a pile of bullets excavated from the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. He climbed the stairs to a classroom, nodding a greeting as he entered.

The unlikely assemblage had come together around a common goal: slashing energy costs and, ultimately, keeping the lights on.

The Mine Wars Museum commemorates the coal miners’ fight to unionize, earn fair wages and work in safe conditions. The exhibits of historical artifacts – photographs, weaponry, garments, cookware and more – are housed within the former Matewan National Bank, a space the museum previously leased from the local 1440 chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, then purchased in 2023.

Thomas Jude, communications manager for the museum, said, “Taking on this building as an asset really put us in a different place financially. We had to go after any way to lower utility costs and make this place self-sustain.”

Energy efficiency is the museum’s big issue, with some of the most critical challenges stemming from past renovations.

“The previous building owners, UMWA Local 1440, installed some apartments, and then we put up some walls to facilitate having a museum exhibit in an old bank lobby,” Jude said. “That created some air flow issues, which were addressed with different venting areas. And we still have manual thermostats. Automated climate control of the full building, for example, could bring us so much savings.”

That’s why the museum turned to the WVU Industrial Training and Assessment Center, which has been helping organizations in central Appalachia save energy and slash costs since 1992, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

SAVING ENERGY, SAVING COMPANIES

“This is our 33rd year,” ITAC Director Bhaskaran Gopalakrishnan said. “I joined the WVU faculty in 1988 and in 1991 began developing the ITAC project under the mentorship of Ralph Plummer, who was department chairman at the time and my guru.

“Our team goes out to facilities and conducts no-cost holistic assessments. The assessments fold in water, smart manufacturing, decarbonization – but the lion’s share is an energy assessment: looking at each operation’s energy consumption and finding ways to reduce it.”

A powerful engine for WVU’s land-grant mission, the ITAC has conducted more than 600 assessments for small and medium-sized enterprises and water treatment facilities: the bulk in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and many in other states, including Virginia and Maryland.  

For those enterprises, the assessments have generated cumulative savings of over $39 million when adjusted to reflect the Consumer Price Index, with an average payback on investment period of just six months.

Results like those are why the Center has received the West Virginia Governor’s Award of Excellence and the Department of Energy IAC Center of Excellence Award, and why then-Gov. Jim Justice honored Gopalakrishnan with the Distinguished Mountaineer Award in 2022, recognizing his service to the state.

A professor at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, Gopalakrishnan understands that people and behaviors matter as much as seals, sensors or power-saving devices when it comes to energy waste. “Workforce development and student success is our cornerstone,” he said. “Within WVU, we’ve trained over 100 graduate and undergraduate students who come from fields ranging from applied energy to manufacturing, and we’re very proud that 100% of our recent graduates now work in various capacities with the domain of energy efficiency.”

Beyond WVU, the ITAC has built a workforce development program in collaboration with the state community college system, and it presents a training at the site of every assessment. The Mine Wars Museum training was presented under the auspices of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Industrial Assessment Center of Excellence, a partnership between the ITACs of WVU and Lehigh University.

For that early morning gathering, ITAC partner WVU Industrial Extension had invited another Mingo County organization: the Coalfield Development Highwall project. At the Highwall site, young people develop workforce skills in crop and livestock agriculture while earning associates degrees and transforming a reclaimed strip mine into a thriving solar farm. Several members of the project joined the Matewan training to gather information on best energy practices.

Also in the room was local business owner, Bill Sutterlin, owner of The Blue Goose Inn and several neighboring buildings up and down Mate Street. Sutterlin, who has an engineering background, said he came by to get educated on new technologies.

He’d come to the right place. The ITAC team was equipped with tech that enabled them to show attendees how carbon dioxide levels had risen as the group sat and exhaled, and they passed around devices participants used to find the room’s hot and cold spots, measure the air flow, and meter light levels and electrical currents.

As the trainees learned about Energy Star ratings, window glazing, air contaminants and decoding electric bills, the locomotives passing nearby sent rumbles through the room. Even here in the heart of the southern coalfields, none of the cars were heaped with coal. Instead, the trains carried tanks of natural gas, as well as long chains of empty open-top hopper cars. They represented a changing Appalachian energy economy, rattling the windows of a building fighting to sustain its energy needs.

TRANSFORMATION, 304 STYLE

Many of the ITAC’s recommendations are backed by the financial clout of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Manufacturing businesses and water treatment plants that meet certain criteria can apply for Department of Energy funding, and for those selected, the federal government will provide up to $300,000 for every energy efficiency recommendation the ITAC has made, via a 50% matching grant. If the ITAC report contains 10 recommendations, for example, a manufacturer that decides to implement all 10 becomes eligible for up to $3 million in funding.

Many of the organizations Gopalakrishnan has worked with have been able to make improvements to their facilities thanks to those grants, and more than 50% of the ITAC recommendations end up being implemented.

Among those success stories is the Paul Wissmach Glass Company, which has manufactured art and kiln glass on the Ohio River just south of New Martinsville for the last 120 years.

The current owner, Jason Wilburn, bought the company with his wife three years ago. At the time, he said they knew they’d need to make some upgrades to the glassmaking equipment, with an eye to controlling air pollution from dust and flue exhaust.

“Gopala looked at projects we had already identified, then identified additional projects and helped us figure out the path forward: where our efficiency savings could come from, and what our cost savings could be. He helped us get a $500,000 grant from the USDA, which we put toward a $1.2 million project, the biggest piece of which was a new flue system for four of our large furnaces. Because of Gopala’s involvement, we now have much more control over the environment within our combustion chambers, which means we can control our gases better and have lowered our costs.”

The company is committed to making glass “the old-school way,” Wilburn said: pouring molten glass into equipment that rolls it out. That hasn’t changed, even after the grant money helped Wilburn upgrade the rolling machine and replace 30-year-old furnace burners with new, digitally controlled electronic burners, in addition to the new motorized and pressure-controlled flue.

“We would have really, really struggled with some problems if we didn’t have Gopala in our corner,” Wilburn said. “His team didn’t just show up for half a day, send us a report telling us what to do, then walk away. It was a very iterative, very supportive process.”

Another business beloved by West Virginians, Mister Bee Potato Chips in Parkersburg, received a USDA match grant of more than $450,000, and co-owner Mary Anne Ketelsen tells a story that echoes Wilburn’s.

“Our small business benefitted greatly when the WVU Industrial Training and Assessment Center conducted an energy audit of our facilities and found many actionable items we could fix,” Ketelsen said.

SHARED PAIN POINTS, SHARED RELIEF

According to Roseline Mostafa, the ITAC’s lead graduate research assistant, the top three drains on energy in commercial buildings are heating, which accounts for a hefty 32% of all nonresidential building energy use; followed by cooling, then lighting.

Roseline said she’s found that lighting and HVAC systems represent cost-saving opportunities for pretty much everyone the ITAC works with.

“Everybody has lighting, everyone can benefit measurably from changing to LED lights and getting some light sensors connected to dimmer systems. Another very common issue that we see is compressed air systems. Compressed air is in general a very inefficient system, and when businesses waste a lot of compressed air, they lose a lot of energy. And we make a lot of recommendations involving boilers. A lot of places use boilers for heating and some places use boilers for their processes. It’s not common that the oxygen levels in the burners are well-tuned, because that requires regular maintenance, which rarely happens. But those burners make a big difference in terms of energy.”

Roseline came from Bangladesh to earn first her masters degree and now her Ph.D. at WVU. She was drawn to the University as much by the reputation of the industrial engineering faculty as by the area’s natural beauty, she said, and in her work with the ITAC, she’s had the chance to travel extensively through the West Virginia hills and the larger Appalachian region.

The day before the team visited the Mine Wars Museum, they were in Prichard, West Virginia, assessing the Okuno plant, which makes hydraulic cylinders. A few weeks prior to that, they performed an assessment at Cleaveland/Price, a manufacturer of electrical switches just outside Pittsburgh. C-Care, in Maryland, which makes professional hair care products, has benefitted from the ITAC’s services. So has Wheeling’s W.A. Wilson Glass, a glass and architectural aluminum fabricator with operational needs very different from those of Paul Wissmach Glass.

One place that amazed Roseline was the former Entsorga facility in Martinsburg.

“They collected garbage from all over the place, shredded it, processed it and sold it as a solid fuel to other companies. Their plant processed garbage, so it was stinky for sure,” she laughed. “But I never thought that this could be done, so it was a very interesting experience for me.”

Truth be told, each new assessment is an interesting experience for Roseline.

“Every business is different. That's why the intellectual enjoyment in finding potential improvements and designing a solution make the work exciting for me. I find the combination of engineering principles with problem-solving to be fascinating, and the rewarding part is when I see the implementation of our ideas enhancing a business’s sustainability.”

SUSTAINING THE FUTURE OF PRESERVING THE PAST

“Energy prices are expected to remain high, so the time to save energy is now,” Gopalakrishnan said. “And buildings are the biggest drain on U.S. energy consumption, accounting for 39% of our national energy usage. Residential and commercial buildings use more energy than transportation – cars, planes, public transit – and more energy than industry.”

But, he emphasized, not every ITAC recommendation requires a six-figure investment in cutting-edge technologies. Some solutions, like turning down the hot water heater or turning off lights and equipment when not in use, cost nothing at all.

Most of the businesses the ITAC assesses benefit from relatively low-tech tools like reflectors, which diffuse light over a wider area; photo sensors, which switch lights on or off depending on the amount of natural light in a space; or occupancy sensors, which turn lights on when people are in a room and off when they exit.

Simply training staff to ensure HVAC systems receive regular preventive maintenance can yield yearly energy savings of 6%-to-19%, Gopalakrishnan said.

The ITAC’s recommendations for the Mine Wars Museum included replacing air conditioners, changing all lighting to LED, moving to a tankless hot water system, and installing a building energy management system to automate scheduled adjustments to ventilation, lighting, heating and cooling throughout the multi-use space.

Gopalakrishnan’s team estimated the updates would shave approximately 34% off the building's energy costs. Saving over $4,000 annually, the investments would pay for themselves in an estimated four years.

Mine Wars Museum Executive Director Mackenzie New-Walker remembered how she first discovered the ITAC while she was researching the possibilities of solar power.

“When we purchased our building, we quickly realized that utilities would be our biggest expense — surpassing even our mortgage,” she said. “We immediately began exploring solar as a potential cost-saving solution; however, one of our board members wisely suggested that we look into other aspects of the building’s energy usage as well.

“That’s when I was introduced to Dr. Gopalakrishnan and his work. He has been an incredible resource, guiding us through every step of the process, and he’s been so responsive. Now we’re looking at how to apply his findings in our future fundraising efforts to bring the building up to current energy standards. I’m excited to see how this partnership will support the museum’s sustainability.”