News & Insights

Campus growth rarely waits for infrastructure to catch up. Universities are adding buildings, expanding programs, and taking on more research space, and every new square foot puts pressure on the central utility systems, keeping those spaces running. For institutions like UC San Diego, rising chilled water demand isn’t just a mechanical question. It shapes whether the next phase of campus development moves forward on schedule, on budget, and without disrupting the reliability students, faculty, and researchers rely on every day.

Central plant expansions ask facilities leaders to make decisions today that will shape operations for decades. Do you build for current load, or invest in headroom for future chillers and equipment turnover? How do you deliver cost-effective capacity while still advancing sustainability goals? And how do you keep an existing plant running reliably while construction happens around it? Choices about layout, redundancy, and how new systems tie into legacy infrastructure all carry long tails—affecting operator safety, maintenance access, and how confidently the plant can scale the next time growth calls for it.

Our teams approach central plant work as a long-horizon planning problem rather than a one-time build. That means asking how operators will run the plant day to day, how equipment will be swapped in and out over its life cycle, and how expansion phases can move forward without disrupting the campus behind them. On projects like UC San Diego’s central plant expansion, that lens shaped decisions around a segregated condenser water system, individual chiller control, and space planned for what comes next. Hear from the UC San Diego and Salas O’Brien teams on how the plant was designed for growth, reliability, and the operators who run it every day.