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Redwood City Central Energy Hub

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A fresh start in sustainability

At the time of design and construction, the Redwood City campus, or RWC for shorthand, was a clean state for sustainable endeavors. The RWC Central Energy Hub (CEH) represents the global potential of what SESI could be. The campus aims to capitalize on this opportunity for new innovations by meeting and exceeding the university’s sustainability goals. CEH, is a huge part of this endeavor. Despite having an immense impact, CEH itself is impressively small. CEH is a “mini Central Energy Facility (CEF),” incorporating all the same heat recovery and thermal storage technology at one tenth the campus CEF scale. The facility's success is proof of the highly adaptable nature of SESI innovation and technology implemented at the campus CEF. 

CEH is small, but mighty. It provides all of the heating demand for the new campus, helps support the campus’s sustainability goals and saves approximately $60 million in operating costs over 30 years compared to traditional systems in local buildings. This success is in part because RWC was built with a sustainable energy system in mind. Each building runs at direct access electricity, can manage HVAC, and is set up for hot water at distribution at 110 degrees. This maximizes the value of heat recovery and allows RWC to be supported by CEH alone. 

But sustainability isn’t just about checking the boxes, it’s a mindset. CEH presence on the Redwood City campus is putting Stanford sustainability front and center. It is a testament to the scalability, replicability, and efficiency of groundbreaking SESI innovations in numerous contexts, able to serve the large-scale energy demands of big cities to the small-scale demands of an individual home.