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Warning: Contents under pressure

Posted on | August 12, 2009 | 762 views |

McCracken Power Plant keeps the home fires burning

By Julia Harris

McCracken Power Plant is the rumbly, hissing heart of Ohio State, sending steam and chilled water through campus arteries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Its two big chimneys exhale clouds of heat into the air year round, though the spectacle is most notable on wintry days.

On bright, sweltering summer afternoons, of course, the power plant is anything but wintry.

The heat from its five massive boilers and battery of chilled water generators is enough to wilt even the most tropical of hothouse flowers. Pipes and instrumentation jut out of walls and lower from ceilings, which can be touched easily by even the shortest of adult visitors. And the sound of the place is like being caught at the business end of a jet engine.

When you consider that each of its boilers is juggling roughly 150,000 lbs/hr of steam pressure and 15,000 gallons per minute of chilled water - not to mention the 30,000 gallons per minute of unchilled water - it’s not surprising that McCracken shudders as if it’s about to lift itself off the ground.

“We supply about 85 percent of the non-electric heat to campus,” said Jon Harris, superintendent of the facility.

With 25 years of experience under his belt, Harris knows the lay of the labyrinth like no one else. He conducts visitors from boiler to boiler and describes each one’s capabilities.

With all its generators, turbines, boilers, pipes, grating and gauges, it seems as if McCracken could easily supply all the power needs of a medium-sized suburb.

But looks, of course, can be deceiving.

“We don’t actually make our own electricity here,” said Ross Parkman, senior director of the facility and the one who oversees all distribution systems.

He smiled sheepishly. “Technically we’re a combined steam plant and chilled water plant. We used to generate our own power, back in the ‘old days,’ but it wasn’t cost effective for us to stay in the electricity business. But I think people will always call us a power plant.”

No matter what it’s called, McCracken is certainly a powerhouse. The facility generates enough steam to heat 135 buildings on campus, which translates into 16 million square feet of real estate. And the recently installed chillers provide cooled water for heating and air conditioning systems in 32 buildings.

“We pump it around in a circle,” Parkman said. “It leaves McCracken at 40 degrees and comes back at 54, and then we cool it down and send it around again. It’s 20-25 percent more efficient than running individual chillers all over campus.”

The trend is one Parkman, who’s been at McCracken a little more than five years, intends to see continue. Current improvement projects center around more efficiently recycling the steam pumped through campus and capitalizing on other locations and sources of energy.

A concept that interests him is a system called cogeneration, in which a power plant simultaneously generates electricity and useful heat.

He leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head. “And what about windmills in Lima or on Gibraltar Island? What about solar? What about geothermal?” he mused.

“We’re starting to really focus on energy and sustainability, so much better than in the past,” he said. “We’re driving all of our new construction to be sustainable.”

• There is storage capacity for 480,000 gallons of fuel oil (a seven-day supply) that can be burned in the event of a natural gas shortage.

• There are two 138,000-volt lines that supply the OSU substation from American Electrical Power, through underground lines that are protected from the weather and therefore tend to be more reliable — as when Hurricane Ike came through in the fall.

• Boiler No. 5, the biggest boiler at McCracken, produces steam at 750 degrees. The smaller boilers generate steam at 650 degrees.

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