"What keeps you up at night?"
That was the question Mark Helms put to his director of operations not long after arriving at the University of Florida as Assistant Vice President of Facilities Services.
The answer came quickly.
It wasn't a budget shortfall or a failed piece of equipment.
It was a building.
UF is one of the most complex campuses in the country: 25 million square feet of facilities across 2,000 acres, supporting more than $1 billion in annual research. Labs, hospitals, classrooms, and veterinary clinics all depend on reliable cooling, water, and power every day. About 450 acres are conservation land — complicating everything from stormwater permitting to new infrastructure work.
Like most universities that grew fast, the infrastructure followed development. Buildings were added. Pipes followed. Energy plants were built wherever the next expansion happened to land.
By the time Helms began evaluating the system, UF had ten independent energy plants, aging utilities, and no campus-wide master plan.
The infrastructure worked.
No one had ever really looked at it as one connected system.
At HEFF, Helms shared what happened when his team finally did.
The answer to Helms' question was UF's veterinary complex.
Nearly one million square feet of research labs, teaching space, and emergency animal clinics depend on that facility. The heating and cooling plant had been built inside the building itself — and over time, replacing any piece of equipment meant removing other equipment just to create space. By the time the team assessed it, the complex was carrying $23 million in deferred capital renewal.
A major renovation would have required shutting down systems supporting active research and clinical operations. For a top veterinary program, that wasn't feasible.
So Helms' team flipped the problem.
Instead of rebuilding inside the facility, they built a new energy plant outside the building entirely. The veterinary complex kept running while the new infrastructure was constructed and connected. Downtime during the transition was minimal.
The math made the decision clear. A new external plant cost approximately $25 million — just slightly more than the deferred maintenance already sitting inside the building. Helms' team closed a $10 million funding gap through an ESCO (energy service company) partnership, structuring the loan to be repaid through the energy savings the new plant would generate. The savings supported the loan. The project moved forward.
What started as a workaround revealed something bigger. If one facility could benefit from stepping back and rethinking the system, where else had years of incremental growth created opportunities no one had stopped to question?
At the time, UF's ten energy plants all operated independently. Each plant served the buildings around it, but none of them could share capacity if demand shifted or equipment went offline somewhere else on campus.
Helms' team began connecting them into a looped distribution system — starting with four of the major chiller plants rather than attempting to tackle the entire campus at once.
By linking those plants, UF gained 4,800 additional tons of cooling capacity without constructing a new plant.
The equipment didn't change. The strategy did.
That same thinking extended beyond the central plants.
During conversations with the local electric utility, Helms asked a straightforward question: what happens if the university receives power at 69 kilovolts instead of 23?
The upgrade required roughly $2.5 million in electrical improvements.
The change lowered UF's utility rate by approximately $5 million per year.
Helms was direct about this: there is no single magic solution.
UF's gains have come from dozens of decisions compounding over time — building automation, smarter plant controls, occupancy strategies, peak shaving, equipment replacement. Not every plant warranted the same level of investment. Some had too little load to justify major spending — and knowing which ones to prioritize was part of the strategy. Since 2008, the university has added more than five million square feet while continuing to reduce energy use per student. UF now has 107 sustainably certified buildings — more than any other public university in the country.
More campus. Less energy intensity.
None of it happened without friction. Some staff still preferred pneumatic controls because that's what they knew. Helms' approach was consistent: introduce the new technology, then sit down and explain why it matters. He also worked with UF's CFO to reinvest demonstrated energy savings back into further improvements — turning results into a funding runway rather than a one-time win.
One other piece of advice landed with the room: always have shovel-ready projects waiting. When unexpected funding appears, the project that's already planned is the one that gets funded.
But Helms left the room with one final message.
"We've been taught to be quiet. Slip in, slip out. If nobody sees you, they aren't worried about you. We need to tell our story better."
Maybe that's the real return on understanding your system.