Hi everyone and welcome to GreenMonk TV. We're here at the Adobe building's West Tower and with me on the show today, I have Randy Knox. I'm the Senior Director of Global Workplace Solutions for Adobe and in that role I oversee our facilities, real estate and physical security. Okay, and Randy, this building is LEED certified? That's correct. It's one of four that we have that's LEED EB Platinum certified now. Superb. And we're standing in front, we're standing in your patio area with some lovely grass and some nice plants around. What are the significance of these? Well, what we'd like to show folks here is what we've done to reduce our outdoor water use or our landscape irrigation. We've put in drought tolerant plantings. All the plantings are native California and it's a drought tolerant fescue grass that we're using. We have drip irrigation under the lawn, we have drip irrigation everywhere. Our systems are all monitored by what we call ET controllers that stands for evapotranspirational. What they do is they monitor the communications between weather satellites and ground stations and then based on the weather that's coming in, it determines how much watering, if any, is required that day. And by the use of the technology and the drought tolerant planting and the drip irrigation, we've reduced our landscape irrigation by 76%. 76%? Yes. Wow, that's impressive. Randy, we're in the bathroom in the West Tower. Can you tell us why we're here? Yeah, this is quite a show place for Adobe. We like to bring our visitors here. But we refer to this as our touch-free bathroom and we believe it offers a lot healthier environment for our employees. Basically, you don't have to touch anything while you're in here. Everything is either motion-sensitive. For example, on our faucets, the water is motion as is the soap dispenser. And then we use our automated towel dispensers. We have waterless urinals and it's automatic flush valves on our toilets.
2:03When you say waterless urinals, is it just that they detect when someone walks away and then they spray water? No, no. They use no water. It's a chemical reaction that handles the waste and chemically treats it so that there's no water required to flush it. Wow, brilliant. Yes. Go on. As a consequence, we've saved over 36% on our domestic water use. Wow. So, Randy, you were just showing us the cooling outside. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yes. I'd like to show off the cooling tower and share a story. One of our building engineers oversaw a bill come in one day for sewer use. The sewer basically is billed on whatever your intake is. They bill that as an outtake. And we found out that we were losing a lot of our water through evaporation of our cooling tower. So, the building engineer was asked if he could measure that and quantify it, and he said sure. So, he put water meters on the intake and water meters on the outflow and took that variance. And we went to PG&E, or to the local water company. And they rebated us $20,000 for the previous three years. And they've reduced our sewer bill by $10,000 a year. Because you're not pushing out as much water through the sewers. It's going up through the water towers in evaporation. Exactly. Lovely. You also mentioned that you're staging the coolers to reduce your overall demand spikes. Right, exactly. And we figured there was a programming cost there of about $575 to do that, to change the staging. And we're saving about $12,000 a year. And that works because instead of getting cumulative spikes of all of the coolers coming on at the same time, they're staged to come on individually, one after the other. That's correct. And therefore, you don't get large spikes, and you're not built on the large spikes. You're built on the kind of flat line. Right. Okay, super. So, Randy, what are we seeing in this room? We're in the boiler room, and we're looking at our boilers. And talking a little bit about some of the things that we've incorporated here. We changed the run time, modified the run times.
4:06Cost us about $600 to do that modification. We're saving about $42,000 a year. Wow. And we also installed digital controls on our boilers. That cost us $800 and saving us about $1,800 a year. So, about a six-month payback on that project. And these are just for boiling water and maybe some air heating? Yes, right. And how are those modifications actually saving money? Where's the saving coming from? Well, I think what was happening was we weren't monitoring the tight enough before. And so they were running longer than they had to, so we basically changed the run time. And the digital controls give us the capability of doing that. And you can do it remotely? Yes. Excellent. Randy, we're standing in front of one of your printers here. Tell me the story about how you're reducing paper use. Well, one of the things I like to point to is not all the ideas come out of corporate, which most people in a large corporation know anyway. But this is one of the ideas that actually came from one of our remote offices. They'd gone to double-sided printing and wanted to know why corporate hadn't done that. So, we've adopted it corporate-wide now. And we've actually reduced our paper use here in San Jose by about 40% as a result. So, all the printers default to double-sided? Yes. Okay. You have to force single-sided printing out. Okay. Brilliant. Another story I like to tell, talking about, and since we're close to the break room, we were always having trouble getting rid of bottled water here in San Jose. And in our Ottawa facility, our facility manager up there, Paula Fitzgerald, implemented, got rid of all bottled water, and went to filtered water systems. And she sent me a justification saying how much money she was saving monthly. So, I extrapolated what it would take for San Jose, which is a much larger facility. And I went to the CFO and said, "Would you be interested in saving $270,000 a year?" Guess what he said. We're in Adobe's building control room, and with me, I've got Ted Ludwig, who's in charge of the systems here. Ted, you're going to give us a demo of some of the things on screen there? Certainly, I'd be happy to show you. Great. Basically, what we're looking at here is a project that we're planning here for the next
6:09couple of months. Any project, basically, remotely involved with the energy conservation, you have to have the before picture and an after picture. So, we developed this page to show us our chilled water plant upstairs on the top floor of this tower, and the energy savings potential that we have. So, to grab the information from before, we trended all the information points that we can possibly trend to see that we actually show some savings once the project is completed. So, we're going to replace the cooling towers this summer, as well as put in a new control strategy to make the plant fully variable flow. So, we're going to take all those constant volume flow pumps, basically, that are either on or off, and make them have cruise control. Superb. So, they can be running faster or slower, depending on what's required? Exactly. Rather than driving like your car with your foot on the gas and the brake, we run just at the right speed all the time. Lovely. Nice one. Okay. What else can I show you guys? We've developed an interesting page for data center management, a good forecasting tool for the folks to make sure that they are informed enough to make all these appropriate decisions. And we can look in an executive summary here of one of our server rooms. Environmental conditions, amount of cooling required to keep the space comfortable, servers and such, our percentage of load electrically, and a lot more information, certain statuses of equipment and such. We're able to look inside any of the spaces and see real-time electrical readings, temperatures, humidities, all real-time. It allows a minute control and a very speedy response to any problem conditions. So, in these server rooms, you have a stack of sensors monitoring all this information all the time? Yeah. We have 30,000 sensors throughout the campus. We're about 1 million square feet of office space on top of a million square feet of garage, four large server rooms, all running and happily keeping us employed.
8:09Electrically, we can drop down into any of the main panels and use this information to be very deliberate and smart about how we fill out a data center without unnecessarily increasing the risk by overloading a circuit or, you know, potentially tripping a breaker. Okay. You're involved with demand response programs with your local provider PG&E as well? Absolutely. Any of the large electrical users in the state are asked to participate and Adobe, of course, was willing to do so, not just to get the energy reduction costs and, you know, cost per KW, but to try to do their part. So, we're able to kind of show our energy reductions if we use our energy dashboard here. And I'll bring this up just a second. And so, what we're looking at is a load profile. And so, we've divided our building loads up into what is the building, what is the server room, and how they interact with each other. And so, we're able to see here the different days of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the weekend, and the portion of today. Lots of information electrically so we can try and increase our performance by eliminating waste. And so, basically, the better we do our job given the current conditions, the more money we save and the better the company does. And the less carbon you're emitting. Less carbon we're emitting, of course. We're able to track this information in dollars and cents and know what the data centers cost us, as well as the building. We can also click right over to the tab that gives us CO2 emissions. Now, right now, we're just tying in our electrical usages and next is natural gas. Okay, so these are actually charts of the CO2 emitted by the facility based on electrical usage at the moment. And as you say, you'll be tying in natural gas shortly. Exactly right. Great. Are you monitoring water through this as well? Oh, definitely. Water is one of our biggest successes. We've had lots of success in reducing our water usage. And the ways we've done that is simple things, just identifying the water wasting.
10:12Also, in terms of landscape, for instance, choosing plants that don't use a lot of water. And on top of that, we actually tied in weather satellites into our controllers so that we don't water when it's raining. Seems simple, but you try and get your building to do it. Superb. Gosh. We've also developed a forecasting module to help us to, again, improve our operations so that we're being as efficient as possible, given the current circumstances. And so what we've done is we've tracked weather patterns that are similar to today's. We've chosen five out of our past two or three years of information. And the best we've ever done is this lower line. And the worst we've ever done is this upper line. And that's based on today's conditions. Here, in the red, is what we're doing today. So obviously, we're in between the best and the worst. And then we're shooting for the best, of course. Yep. We tied in this weather line to show the outdoor air temperature because that has a huge impact on how much energy we use. And so anything we can do to eliminate these spikes and peaks is going to end up saving us energy. Fantastic. Great. Super. Ted, thanks for being in. That's been fantastic. You're very welcome. Thanks for coming.