Aquarium of the Pacific Promotes Energy Efficiency

LONG BEACH, Calif. — At the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, sustainability is part of workplace culture. That’s why it was recently voted Best Green Company to Work For by the Los Angeles Daily News.

“Energy is one of our big costs,” said John Rouse, vice president of operations at Aquarium of the Pacific. “We have a goal to stay within our high in 2002 for kilowatt hours, which was 12 million kilowatt hours per year. We’re trying to stay a little bit below that or a little bit above that based on the growth of the aquarium.”

Energy needs for an aquarium are demanding and always changing. Over the past decade, according to Fahria Qader, project manager, the aquarium has greatly expanded its outdoor spaces, adding three buildings and growing visitor attendance by 27 percent. “Even then, we kept the energy levels constant,” she said.

What’s more, in the past two years, the aquarium has added a penguin exhibit and a steelhead trout exhibit, which demand cold water and pumps that require a lot of energy.

The aquarium is planning to expand even more in the next two or three years, according to Rouse.

“One of our goals is not to add any more energy to the grid,” Rouse said. “So we’re looking at putting in a fuel cell probably in the next year or so. It’ll be a fairly large fuel cell — it will be over a megawatt more than likely. That’s about half of our load at its peak, which is at two in the afternoon on a hot summer day. Our peak is about two megawatts, and our average is about 1.2 megawatts if you average it over a 24-hour period. But we constantly monitor our building automation and our [energy] load, and some of the systems can turn on and off based on that load.”

Being an aquarium, water conservation is a huge priority for Aquarium of the Pacific. The facility also monitors potable water usage,has reduced that usage by about 30 percent since 2002, according to Qader. To conserve water, the aquarium installed a watershed garden and took out about 5,000 square feet of front lawn space to put in a drip irrigation system.

“Then we installed dual-flush toilets, waterless urinals and automated faucets in the restrooms,” Qader said. “We also have a weather-based irrigation controller that ties to most of our landscaped areas, and that also helps in terms of using less water. We’ve also done audits with the Long Beach water department. They gave us a few ideas but said in general that we were on the right path.”

Every five years, the aquarium is recommissioned to ensure energy efficiency in every aspect of operation. For example, Rouse said, the aquarium is in the process of upgrading its lighting system.

“We’re in the process of changing a lot of our lighting over to LED from metal halide because some of the [water] tanks have 1,000-watt, metal halide bulbs, and we can easily replace that with 100- or 150-watt LED. That’s a pretty big savings,” Rouse said.