2025 ASHRAE Southern California Chapter Spring Technical Conference

DATE: April 7, 2025

TIME/DURATION: 8:30am-3:00pm

LOCATION: CSU Dominguez Hills - 1000 E Victoria St, Carson, CA 90747

This comprehensive half-day seminar and optional central utility plant tour is designed to be a collaborative transfer of knowledge addressing the latest in technological trends and applications in the HVAC-R industry.

TOPIC : "DECARBONIZE & REVITALIZE: STRATEGIES FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF

EXISTING BUILDINGS

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Session I: Decarbonization Journey - Integrating AI for Optimal Campus Energy Efficiency

Join us for an insightful session exploring how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing energy efficiency on campuses. This presentation will feature real-world data and charts illustrating remarkable energy savings. Attendees will gain actionable strategies and techniques to achieve an ambitious 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions within just three years.

Key takeaways include methods to identify and eliminate hidden energy waste, practical guidance on safeguarding your Building Automation System (BAS) during AI implementation, and a compelling case study on using AI to enhance cooling system efficiency—achieving an impressive improvement from 0.70 kW/ton to 0.35 kW/ton.

Additionally, learn from the largest Heat Pump project on the West Coast, which has successfully reduced gas usage at the Central Plant by an extraordinary 95%.

Discover how leveraging AI and innovative technologies can drive sustainable energy solutions and accelerate your decarbonization journey. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn, innovate, and lead the charge toward a greener future!

Speakers:

Kenny Seeton

Facilities Services | Director of Central Plant Operations and Strategic Energy Projects

CSU Dominguez Hills

Kenny Seeton is the Director of Central Plant Operations and Strategic Energy Projects for Cal State Dominguez Hills and has occupied that position since 2011. He currently manages a team of ten employees responsible for the heating, cooling and maintenance of approximately 1.5 million square feet of classroom and office space on campus, as well as Central Plant equipment. As the campus energy director, he also oversees sustainability, lighting retrofits, MBCx on buildings, and HVAC optimization and controls for the campus. He enjoys working with students and his crew to come up with innovative ways to increase comfort and reduce energy. His efforts have reduced CSUDH GHG emissions by over 50%. While not afraid to test the untested, Kenny also believes that “If Better is possible then Good is not enough."

Keith Gipson

Founder | CEO

FACIL.AI

One of the top building automation technicians at Honeywell in the late 80's and engineers at Johnson Controls in the mid 90's, Keith Gipson has been a pioneer in the Buildings IoT, Enterprise Energy Management (EEM) industries and technology for over twenty-five years. In 1997 Keith Co-Founded the first EEM company, Silicon Energy Corp., which was sold to Itron in 2001 for $71 M. In 2005 Keith co-founded Shield Ops Inc. He architected an AI driven CSI and evidence linking program to help law enforcement discover, classify and correlate crime data as featured on the television show CSI Las Vegas (Season 10, Episode 4 "Coup De Grace").

Most recently Keith was CTO of Phoenix Energy Technologies, which he also co-founded, where he architected the Enterprise DX (“Data eXchange") EEM platform that monitors and controls over 16,000 retail and commercial buildings, one of the largest integrated, web-based EEM platforms ever created. In March of 2020, after thirteen years, Keith left Phoenix ET to apply his vision and experience to build a conversational AI Autonomous Optimization (AIAO) solution. Keith holds a United States patent (US 6,178,362 Enterprise Energy Management System and Method 2001) and was honored by Southern California Edison as “A Modern Day African-American Inventor” for his contributions to the electric utility industry. He resides in Los Angeles, CA with his wife Andrea.

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Session II: Accelerating the Energy Transition: Integrating Solar, Storage, and Electrification for a Holistic Approach

Customers need affordable, clean, and reliable energy, but our current approach to the energy transition is hampered by the traditional notion of having to first implement energy efficiency before installing on-site solar and storage. This stepwise approach to decarbonization and energy system planning is slowing the pace of climate change goals. The economic reality is that customers will need to electrify while adding solar and storage. State agencies and utilities forecast hundreds of billions of dollars in grid upgrades that will require major rate increases while hindering the needed paradigmatic shifts in energy market participation. But this transition is leaving communities of concern behind and lacks a holistic plan where demand side and grid side management are truly integrated.

Speaker:

Marc Costa | LEED AP BD+C | CGBP | BOC® II | CPHC

Director of Policy & Planning, The Energy Coalition

Marc Costa is Director of Policy and Planning at The Energy Coalition (TEC). He has more than fifteen years of experience in the building industry focusing on areas ranging from advanced energy community planning, federal energy data standards, and software development, as well as local government, state, federal, and international energy policy.

Marc is an active member of multiple policy and technical initiatives at the United Nations and International Energy Agency focusing on the rapid, equitable acceleration of electrification paired with clean energy resources. He serves in leadership positions at the Gridwise Architecture Council, California Technical Forum, and numerous industry groups. He also co-founded the OpenStudio Coalition to ensure free and open access to building energy modeling tools across the world. He holds a B.S. in Management Science from UCSD, a B.S. in Construction Engineering from CSULB, and is a LEED AP, CGBP, and BOC Level II, and Certified Passive House Consultant.

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Session III: Embodied Carbon in Integrated Design: Practical Approaches and Policy Insights

Christine will cover the topic of embodied carbon in the context of integrated design, and how practitioners can incorporate this consideration into their workflows. She will highlight some of the recently adopted building code and policy measures related to embodied carbon, and discuss key considerations like building envelope performance, evaluating the embodied carbon of new equipment during efficiency upgrades, and the concept of the time-value of carbon.

Speaker:

Christine Tiffin, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, ID+C, WELL AP

Senior Consultant, Arup
Christine Tiffin is a Senior Consultant on the Sustainability, Climate, Resilience and Environment team at Arup in San Francisco and leader of Arup’s Embodied Carbon Working Group for the Americas region. She specializes in embodied carbon, whole-building life cycle assessment, sustainable building materials, and green rating systems. She helps project teams with practical advice to make more informed design decisions using data and computational tools that integrate easily into real workflows and is frequently consulted from within Arup globally for the cutting-edge embodied carbon work she has conducted on building services equipment and systems. She enjoys helping teams find practical ways to create healthier, more environmentally and socially conscious projects.

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Conference participants will be offered an optional tour of the CSUDH Central Utility Plant after the conference sessions.

*** Breakfast and Lunch are included***

REGISTRATION COST $50.00 Members $65.00 Non-Members
SIGN UP NOW!

For More Questions Contact Frank Schwamborn at frank.schwamborn@arup.com

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1000 East Victoria Street, Carson, United States