October 30, 2005
Opinionist: Most Informative Email of the Week
On Sundays, Gothamist runs opinion pieces on issues relevant to life in New York. The views expressed below are solely those of the author-- really, Gothamist couldn't care less.
I get a lot of email each week. Most of it is spam (best subject line of the last 24 hours: "Your dog can be the best learner you've ever had.") Occasionally, however, I get an email that's actually worth reading, and every so often, I'm going to select one of these and share it with you. The email below was a followup comment on the National Geographic diagram post I did last week-- Evan Bray wrote in and taught me something about the way steam power works in our city:
As I understand it, there was a new ConEd plant in Long Island City that went online in the seventies or some shit. Apparently, when one generates electricity on that scale it makes huge plumes of steam (read: eyesore). At any rate, ConEd figures, let's recycle the steam and sell it to buildings for heat; obviously there was significant costs associated with laying the pipe;initially they sold it dirt cheap. Then, after a lot of large class A office buildings bought into it--I would estimate a majority of them--they started to jack the price up periodically and now that they are all dependent, one can only assume, make a killing on a byproduct of electrical generation.It is pumped into the City under extremely high pressure as evidenced by the occasional steam line explosion that usually leaves a big hole in the street and a few people dead. It actually makes sense to heat a million square feet of office space with steam. Obviously they have pressure reducing valves at the point of entry into the building so as not to risk blowing the building up and subsequently there is no boiler that can explode as you don't need it to generate the steam. Yay!
I honestly don't believe there is another city in the world that uses steam on such a vast scale and challenge anyone of your readers to prove me wrong.
So there you have it-- can anyone prove Evan wrong? I always wondered where all the steam was going! If you want to learn more interesting facts about ConEd, check out Breakdown, a game by the Gotham Gazette.
Jake Dobkin is the Publisher of the Gothamist network of websites. In his spare time, he enjoys photographing street art.
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I can't beleive that no one has made this connection yet. There is a long discusson on MetaFIlter about the maple syrup smell and...get this....that it came from the ConEd Steam! Look at the middle/end of this thread.
I can't beleive that no one has made this connection yet. There is a long discusson on MetaFIlter about the maple syrup smell and...get this....that it came from the ConEd Steam! Look at the middle/end of this thread.
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/46218
The coolest thing about ConEd steam is that not only can buildings use it for heating, they can use it for cooling. Otherwise they'd have a hard time selling it for over half of the year. The pressure of the steam is used to run compressors that power huge air conditioning systems. This is how most of the large trading floors in the financial industry are cooled.
I remember the day after the blackout, even when power was restored in most of the City, the American stock exchange couldn't open on time because it had to borrow a portable steam generator to get its cooling system running again. I think that was because, despite the power restoration, once it's been shut down, it takes a day or so for the pressure to be restored in the city's steam system.
Actually, this process is a fairly common practice...and though I'm short on specific examples, you'll surely find this in places all over the world. Just don't expect NYC to be a hotbed of environmental efficiency...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Electric_Power_Plant
Jake,
In this photo you look like one of the characters in the video game half life.
http://www.planethalflife.com/screenshot.asp?src=/half-life2/screenshots/05.jpg
I wondered what the steam pipes were for in the diagram. That is so cool!
I believe the occasional steam piping above the streets is actually water dripping/streaming onto the steam pipe and quickly condensing into steam, not the pipe busting open itself. I read that somewhere but hell I could be wrong.
ConEd runs this country's largest district combined heating and cooling system. The largest private system in th US was owned by Suez until they sold it to a hedge fund. There are currently about 50 cities in the US that have district combined heating and cooling systems.
Steam isn't a byproduct of electricity generation -- it's a central part of electricity generation. To the extent that you sell the steam directly, rather than using it to generate electricity, that might be more efficient than converting the steam's thermal energy to electricity, but it does mean you'll be making less electricity.