Fresno State has partnered with Bulldog Infrastructure Group to maintain and update its central utility infrastructure system, while also addressing several other energy conservation measures.

The Central Utility Plant Replacement Project is addressing the campus’ hot and chilled water distribution piping network in order to provide reliable heating and cooling to all buildings.

With the completion date set for Summer 2024, the project has faced some issues within the last couple weeks.

“The project is expected to be substantially complete by the end of July 2024,” said Meredith Sandrik, who works with Facilities Management.

Recent updates from Facilities Management shed light on some of the obstacles the project has faced.

“There have been some unforeseen issues in being able to connect the new permanent chillers to the new switchgear,” said Debbie Adishian-Astone, vice president for administration and chief financial officer in a campus-wide email sent on April 10. “The CUPR contractor is working diligently with our Facilities Management team to identify measures to mitigate this issue.”

Since then, connection to the Central Utility Plant, Science II, Peters Business, Grosse Industrial Technology and the Agriculture Science buildings have faced some issues and are without air conditioning.

“This is a high priority for the contractor and they are hoping to have the connection issue resolved by early next week, hopefully by Monday (April 15),” Adishian-Astone said in the email.

As a response to this issue, the contractor provided a temporary solution to provide chilled water to the buildings. Two chillers and an existing chiller were installed to be operational on April 11 and 12.

Along with that, a generator to support the chillers was installed on Jackson Avenue on April 10.While the generator is powering the chillers until May 10, traffic on Jackson Avenue between Barstow and San Ramon Avenues will be blocked as outlined in the map that was provided in the email.

Contractors are responsible for the costs of their mistakes in a project, which can include rework, delays, and additional materials.

“The contractor is funding the temporary chillers and the temporary generators,” Sandrik said.

In a campus-wide email sent on April 18, it stated that the chillers that were providing chilled water to the buildings on campus experienced a short outage that morning.

“While this has now been resolved, we wanted to let you know that this outage may impact the temperature in several of our campus buildings as the chiller system comes back online,”Facilities Management said in a campus-wide email.

In another campus-wide email sent on April 22, Facilities Management said that while the three chillers were working, they did not have enough power to meet the full capacity to serve all campus buildings.

It was also said that one of the chillers experienced an outage on the night of April 21, the issue was resolved the next morning and the chiller was running again by mid-morning. Due to this outage, some of the buildings experienced warmer temperatures.

“Unfortunately, these intermittent temperature challenges will continue through this week (good news: we will have cooler temperatures starting on Wednesday) until the three permanent chillers are brought online as well as the associated chiller pumps,” Facilities Management said.

The contractor for the project is expecting the new permanent equipment to be operational by early next week.