Replacement of an Existing 2,000 Ton Cooling Tower with (2) 100 Ton HR Assemblies.

This project consisted of designing and installing multiple Slim Jim® exchangers within a man-made pond designed to hold the units.

In 2012, Fort Knox received a $1.2 million grant to install a geothermal pond to heat and cools the post’s largest facility. That led to the AWeb Supply team of contractors providing the base with the equipment and expertise to install a holistic geothermal lake plate solution.

According to Fort Knox Director of Public Works Pat Walsh, the energy team swapped out aging HVAC systems for geothermal technology, which draws heat from the ground in the winter and pushes it back into the ground during summer.

Over several years, Fort Knox replaced approximately 70 percent of the existing Disney Barracks heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems with geothermal heat pumps (GHPs), taking advantage of renewable energy resources. More than 60 percent of total Fort Knox facility square footage, or more than six million square feet, is served by automated geothermal heating and cooling. Additional ground coupled heat pumps are installed in privatized housing.

Today, with hundreds of 500-foot wells and nearly 600 miles of underground pipes, the post uses geothermal to heat and cool 6 million square feet across 109,000 acres.

"Fort Knox has been a pioneer in green energy, with efforts that even predate the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which set a target for federal agencies to improve energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2000. Those efforts have included the kinds of successes and setbacks that tend to accompany pioneering work."