Lauren Donley

CEM, CBPS

Millig Design Build | Vice President

Speaker

Track C: Decarbonization and Electrification Strategies

Session C1: Building Decarbonization

March 11, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Why Invest In a Decarbonization Master Plan?

Many public entities and corporations have committed to greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and many are finding it difficult to tackle such an immense and complex undertaking. It feels overwhelming and it is hard to know where to begin. What you need is a plan.

A Decarbonization Master Plan will allow you to address carbon emissions while achieving multiple other beneficial outcomes:
– Address deferred maintenance
– Coincide with known capital improvement projects
– Reduce operating and maintenance costs
– Increase resiliency
– Improve building comfort
– Avoid reactive decision making

In the last 5 years, our team has created comprehensive Decarbonization Master Plans for over 22 million square feet of complex facilities across North America, including the Washington State Capitol Campus in Olympia, multiple Providence Hospitals, Eagle County in Colorado, and international pharmaceutical manufacturers Sanofi and Thermo Fisher Scientific.

This experience has taught us the following keys to a successful Decarbonization Master Plan:
– Require a detailed, practical plan that identifies specific projects with costs, savings, and an implementation timeline. High-level generalities are not useful for decision-making.
– Base the plan on data, energy modeling, and a holistic understanding of the facilities.
– Reduce heating loads and implement energy efficiency before replacement with electrified systems. This helps reduce first costs and avoid increased utility bills from switching from natural gas to electricity.
– Focus on phased implementation over time that is synergistic with other capital improvement needs. Front load high-impact projects to generate momentum & begin taking advantage of energy & GHG savings immediately.
– Take advantage of energy savings, grants, and tax incentives to buy down the first costs.

Results of this Process:
– A tailored, practical roadmap that details specific projects and phased dates for implementation required to meet your organization’s GHG reduction goals.
– Financial modeling for funding the investment over time, including a comparison between unavoidable equipment costs and climate-driven upgrade options to understand the true cost of decarbonization.

Next we will present real-world results and examples, as well as average costs per square foot for different building types and different regions.

Track A: Mastering Energy Management

Session A3: Cutting Costs with Data

March 12, 2026 | 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Case Study: WSU Campus Chilled Water System Redesign for Operational Improvements & Energy Savings

During the 2023-2025 biennium, Millig worked closely with the WSU Pullman project team to develop and implement an operational redesign and expansion of the campus’s chilled water system. The issues and strategies identified for the Pullman Campus applicable to any water-cooled chilled water system.

WSU’s Pullman campus consists of 8M sqft of facilities served by four chilled water plants with nine individual chillers with a combined capacity of 12,800 tons of cooling. A 2M gallon thermal energy storage (TES) system was intended to store chilled water generated overnight, for deployment during afternoon peak loads.

The following operational issues were uncovered:
– System pressure issues in the distribution network meant that the TES was discharged primarily to satisfy chilled water demand in the loop and deployment of the stored chilled water did not coincide with the peak need.
– Chillers were staged on and off to supplement the TES tank.
– Chillers were experiencing flow control issues between their primary and secondary loops, causing significant levels of return water to be bypassed around the chillers and mix with supply water.
– The chillers were staged on based on their size and location, not based on their individual operating characteristics or efficiencies.
– There was no high-efficiency winter-baseload chiller.

These issues led to a lack of cooling capacity during high temperatures, leading to significant load shedding in the summer, as well as excessively high year-round energy use.

Identifying and addressing these issues required extensive due diligence and the generation of an innovative 8,760-hour digital model of the operation of the entire system using actual performance curves, trend data, and chilled water metering data.

All new controls language and an open-source supervisory controls system were developed to optimize the operation of all chiller plants. Millig also designed a new, highly efficient 500-ton chiller that also has the ability to operate at very low condenser water temperatures to provide additional capacity in the summer and serve as the winter baseload chiller.

The Results:
– Reduction of system-wide energy consumption by 22%
– $216,377 of annual utility cost savings
-$641,117 utility incentive
– Increased the cooling capacity on hot days and no more load-shedding
– Completed for a cost of $1.77M with a simple payback of 5.2 years

Speaker Bio

Lauren Donley, CEM, CBPS, is the co-founder and Vice President of Millig Design Build. Millig Design Build is a highly-technical MEP engineering and construction firm focused on projects that improve engineered systems for decarbonization, building health & safety, & core infrastructure renewal.
Lauren has been working in facilities energy efficiency for 17 years and has focused on Decarbonization Master Planning for the last 5 years. Lauren is an accomplished speaker, presenting recently at the Mountain Towns 2030 Climate Solutions Summit in Breckenridge, the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories Annual Conference in Pittsburgh. Lauren is the co-author of the Washington State Capitol Campus Decarbonization Master Plan - a plan developed over a two-year period with a large stakeholder group which ultimately identified a $150M phased upgrade projects to transition from a traditional fossil fuel infrastructure to an ambient temperature loop thermal energy network with distributed water-to-water heat pumps to fully electrify the campus while reducing overall energy consumption by 53%.

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