Hello Campus Climateers!

 

One of the early perks of my energy officer job at the University of Buffalo was to take students through our coal-burning power plant. This plant was a dirty awful place that was just fascinating in its details – from the giant boilers that radiated far too much heat and glowed red inside to the dusty coal chutes and cavernous coal bunker above.

 

Environmentally, UB’s MacKay Plant was a disaster but it was great fun to tramp around the elevated walkways and describe how that monster worked to wide-eyed students who probably thought I was out of my mind for bringing them there. I repeated told them, “don’t touch anything” because literally everything was covered with coal dust. Local environmentalists, myself included, should have picketed the place and shut it down long before UB converted it to relatively clean natural gas operation a few years ago.

 

Of all the energy consumers on a typical college or university campus, perhaps nothing is bigger and badder than the campus power plant. This giant gobbles down large amounts of fuel – usually coal or natural gas – to produce energy for the rest of the campus. That output energy might be steam or hot water. It might also include electricity and even chilled water if absorption chillers are being used to make use of waste heat during the summer months.

 

So what can be done with your campus power plant? Is it possible to make it greener? It’s probably a large part of your campus’ carbon footprint. Is there any way to shrink that footprint?

 

Here are the basic options:

 

 

Make It Work Less. I won’t spend any time on this terrific strategy other than to say that the environmental damage your campus power plant is doing can be eased by reducing its load. And that can be done by reducing distribution system losses (if the snow melts above your campus’ underground heating pipes, they aren’t well insulated) and by reducing the heat load of your campus buildings. If those buildings were more efficient and less overheated, your power plant could take it easy and pump less carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere.

 

Make It More Efficient. There are 100 ways to make a heating or power plant more efficient, everything from making sure all the pipes are well insulated to installing variable speed drives on fans and pumps to retrofitting stack heat recovery in order to preheat water and combustion air with the heat that would otherwise be wasted going up the stack.

 

For plants without cogeneration, converting to cogen can be an option. By simultaneously producing heat and power, improved efficiencies are possible – though cogen is not necessarily a good option for all campuses. Typically, it works economically when fuels costs are low and avoided electricity costs are high. A favorable “stand-by” power rate from your local utility is also an important ingredient. The stand-by rate is a special tariff which defines the cost of the back-up power you’ll need when your cogeneration unit is down for maintenance or repairs. In some parts of the country these rates are very high and punitive, i.e. intentionally designed to discourage customers from generating their own power.

 

If you switch from coal burning to natural gas cogeneration, a significant campus carbon emissions reduction is likely -- though cogeneration is not a guarantee carbon savings especially in regions of the country where grid-supplied electricity (which you would be buying less of once you start generating your own power) is mostly produced from low-carbon sources, e.g. hydro, nuclear, wind, and natural gas. 

 

Burn Cleaner Fuel.  First, the obvious: Coal is not clean despite all the hype about “clean coal.” Thus, burning cleaner fuel means first and foremost getting off of coal. 

 

Coal is the most carbon intensive fossil fuel. Therefore, burning it produces the most carbon dioxide. For coal to be clean, not only would the air emissions (CO2, NOX, SOX, mercury, particulates, etc.) need to be cleaned up but so would the ash ponds that have gained notoriety after one containing nearly 3 million cubic yards of ash slurry recently breeched in Tennessee, turning a local river into toxic soup.

 

Then there is coal mining. A lot can be said about this but I will let this photo of mountain top coal mining in West Virginia say it all.