One of the questions that the Economics team set out to answer was how much the LSC saved the university in electric costs. The first step to divine the answer to that question would be to see how much the LSC costs to operate. Although the LSC saves the university millions of dollars a year in energy costs, the pumps have to be run using electricity.
As the graphs depict, chillers would have similar costs to power the school. However, the LSC delivers much more cooling to the university as a result of the LSC.
The Economics team also wanted to discern the amount of money the LSC project had saved Cornell. Looking at data from the past 20 years, the team found that the combined costs of funding, constructing and powering the LSC project cost the university:
- $154,643,382
If the university had opted to replace the old chillers and not construct the LSC, the cost to the university would have been:
- $192,999,93
This means that the LSC project saved the university close to 40 million dollars over the past 20 years!