Albuquerque health center's power bill drops from over $44,000 to $20,118
Albuquerque retrofitted its Dede Feldman Los Griegos Health & Social Services Center after HVAC equipment more than 20 years old failed. The city reports the electric bill fell from more than $44,000 a year to $20,118 through August 2026. The takeaway: an emergency replacement became a whole-building fix, with controls, sealing, repaired solar and city-owned metering to verify consumption, solar generation and utility performance.
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Key facts, context, and what it means.
Key takeaways
After its 20+ year-old rooftop HVAC units failed, the City did more than replace them: it also added a building automation system, envelope sealing and sub-metering.
Albuquerque turned failing rooftop HVAC units into a building the city says saw its electric bill drop from more than $44,000 a year to $20,118 through August 2026, and which sends surplus power to the grid in spring and summer.
The savings come from a bundle, including LEDs bought under a separate contract, so the project can't tell you how much came from controls alone versus new hardware.
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Albuquerque's Dede Feldman Los Griegos Health & Social Services Center used to pay more than $44,000 a year for electricity.
The work began after the building's HVAC equipment, which was more than 20 years old, had severe mechanical failures. The project was paid for through a partnership between the Department of Health, Housing & Homelessness (HHH) and the Energy and Sustainability Management Division (ESMD).
Six fixes behind one bill
The mechanical core was the obvious part: failing rooftop units came out, and the old variable air volume delivery system got a full upgrade. Around that, the city added a modern building automation system (BAS) that lets operators schedule equipment and run optimal start and stop sequences.
The envelope work was more surgical. Crews used thermal imaging to find where conditioned air was leaking out and outside air was getting in, then sealed those specific points. All indoor and outdoor lighting moved to high-efficiency LEDs with occupancy sensors, bought under a separate energy performance contract.
Then there was the solar. The site already had an array, but an equipment failure had stopped it producing. One new inverter restored generation. For facility managers with older arrays, it suggests checking whether the panels on the roof are still producing.
What the retrofit changed each year
City of Albuquerque
The last piece is the one that makes the rest believable. The city installed its own metering equipment to continuously verify consumption, solar generation and utility performance. For a municipal energy office reporting results to a mayor and council, that could make the before-and-after numbers easier to check.
Taken together, the list suggests a template for any facilities director facing an unplanned rooftop unit replacement. The mechanical work has to be paid for regardless. Adding controls, sealing and metering to that work could be what turns a like-for-like replacement into a lower bill, though the city's figures do not show how much each measure contributed.
A clinic room with its own climate
The building has a demanding occupancy profile. The center provides emergency food, utility and rental assistance, TEFAP food boxes, emergency diapers and community meeting rooms to residents of the Northeast Heights, Northwest Valley and North Westside, according to the city's facility page. It also hosts a UNM Hospital maternity and family planning clinic offering primary and prenatal care.
That clinic is why the BAS has to hold strict microclimates, including a specialized medical room, while keeping the rest of the building comfortable. The center's regular hours run 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, a fixed schedule that suggests where start and stop sequencing could save energy. The center also offers utility assistance to residents, and the building now sends surplus power to the grid in spring and summer.
Albuquerque turned failing rooftop HVAC units into a building whose electric bill fell from more than $44,000 a year to $20,118, and which routinely sends surplus power to the grid in spring and summer.
Software that watches the equipment
Running schedules is only part of what the new BAS does. The city says thermographic floor plans and trend plotting use dynamic color maps, so operators can spot temperature shifts and equipment issues instantly. The system automatically screens for more than 100 HVAC fault conditions, which means problems get caught before they turn into outages. Environmental indexing balances indoor air quality, temperature and humidity in real time to keep working conditions optimal while staying within energy and carbon targets.
That matters given how this project began. A 20-year-old system failing badly enough to force replacement is the scenario fault diagnostics is designed to get ahead of. How many outages the system prevents at Dede Feldman will only show up over the coming years of operation.
For operators facing an emergency HVAC replacement, Albuquerque's project suggests pricing controls, envelope sealing and sub-metering into the same scope. City-owned meters that continuously verify real-time consumption, solar generation and utility performance could give a facility a way to check its own savings.
The strongest objection to reading this as a controls story is that the savings can't be broken apart. New rooftop units, the VAV upgrade, LEDs under a separate contract and a solar array brought back online all feed the same bill. The project doesn't answer how much a building can save through control tuning alone versus new hardware. And the 2026 figure runs only through August, so it is not directly comparable to a full-year total.
Alamosa is next in line
The signal worth watching is whether Alamosa gets the same city-owned metering from day one. If it does, Albuquerque will have two buildings with verified before-and-after data, a better base for comparison than any single project's bill.
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