Business View Magazine March 2023

54 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 3 “Our market is big, complex, highly secure, big energy users,” says Tibbetts. “From data centers to large-scale DOD and Intel community complexes, our customers operate in some of the most exacting environments on the planet where power reliability, energy efficiency, and security are non negotiables.” Some other M.C. Dean clients include the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) with data centers nationally and worldwide and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Military Imaging and Surveillance Technology (MIST) program. In order to better serve those data centers and complex facilities that require a lot of energy, the company established a focused Facilities Engineering Operations and Maintenance division, led by Director Ervin Caldera. “All of our Facilities Engineering Operations and Maintenance programs have a 24/7/365 Buildings and Operations Center,” says Tibbetts. “We have people maintaining the systems – both preventive and corrective maintenance – and we’re actually operating their energy programs. We’re staging equipment and optimizing its use; doing everything we can to conserve water, power, gas, etc. It’s our job to optimize energy use in those facilities 24/7/365 because we can’t put the mission at risk, and at the same time, we’re there to make sure we’re very good stewards of the energy.” “We look at the major facilities that we’re in today, like the Pentagon, for example,” Caldera explains. “Energy conservation there is a big deal. Through the way that we operate the building, we’ve been able to save a lot of money for the government through optimizing the way that we operate the facility. And we do that across the board. We look at every single kind of facility that we have; we look at the way the facility operates and fine-tune building systems and equipment to save money and conserve energy.” As an example, Caldera cites how it operates at the Social Security Administration National Support Center, located in Urbana MD. “We use reclaimed rainwater to cool the facility,” he relates. If it doesn’t rain, we revert back to normal utilities. It’s a fine balance between the two that’s not only efficient but resilient. We are operating mission-critical facilities; we look at reliability and resiliency, while still being respectful of the environment.” Because so many of M.C. Dean’s clients are government agencies, Tibbetts says that the company has to be on top of the energy policies and mandates emerging from congress and the executive branch and bring them back to our engineered solutions and operational environments “They’re coming fast and hard,” he notes. “There are mandates both from a resilience and conservation standpoint, so we focus on staying abreast, and make sure that we’re leaders in bringing these mandates back. For example, by 2030, an installation has to show that they’ve got the energy availability for a minimum of