What the Heck Is A Steam Pipe Anyway?
After the explosion of a heat pipe in NYC (Only a few blocks away from the NYC UNEASYheadquaters) if left me wondering WHAT exactly heat pipes were.
It turns out that Con Ed has been piping steam–which is a by-product of power generation, naturally–to buildings throughout lower Manhattan since 1882. (The pipe that blew up dates to 1924.) Incredibly, the system, which includes 7 plants, one with a boiler 8 stories tall, produces an average of one million pounds of steam per hour. [...] You might also wonder, as I did, why the heck these pipes are pressurized even in the middle of July–clearly the steam isn’t being piped into radiators. Here it turns out that an additional cleverness has been introduced into the system: buildings in the financial district use the steam to power the compressors that run their massive air conditioning units.
I think that has to be the “greenest” thing, well, way before “green” became popular. The ability to turn waste steam into not only heating for Manhattan, but to also power AC units is quite impressive. Now if they could only do something about the asbestos thing.
