What the Heck Is A Steam Pipe Anyway?
This post was published 2 years 3 months 20 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.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.
*Thank you*. I’m an NYC resident and I was wondering the same thing…why the heck do we have all this dangerous steam running around our city, anyway?
It almost seems that it would be more efficient for ConEd to redirect the steam back into their own power generators rather than maintaining an ancient steam network. Hey, we could run fiber throughout the city through the defunct steam pipes and finally get some decent broadband in this city.
What? Are you telling me that the evil bastard capitalists started being green before government regulation all just so they could save some money and create efficiency? No! That’s unpossible!
What is a pound of steam? Is that like a pound of M&Ms or a pound of rocks? I had no idea that steam had a weight.
Pound as in pressure it exerts in the space it occupies? Or maybe if you condensed it, how much the condensed liquid would weigh? :P
Well, the capitalists weren’t being green, per se. They were being capitalists by using their greed to maximize efficiency. Minimizing waste is a way to increase profits.