Power hour

Over Intersession I had the privilege of accompanying the men’s track and field team on a tour of the Princeton Energy Plant led by Ted Borer, the energy plant manager. A few nuts and bolts: Princeton requires up to 27 mega watts (27,000,000 watts) of power at any given time, a need satisfied through a combination of the cogeneration plant operating on campus and the Princeton Municipal Grid. A General Electric LM-1600 gas turbine at the plant, the same model used in the F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet, generates 15 mega watts while the remainder of our demand is supplied by the grid. Heating and cooling (especially during the extreme seasons of winter and summer) require by far the most energy on campus, overshadowing lighting and other utilities.

Because of this, scientific research buildings (including computer science) are far and away the most energy intensive buildings on campus while residential and administrative buildings have relatively low draws, a fact which surprised many students on the tour. Much of the heating and cooling on campus is distributed from the plant to the more than 150 buildings on campus through an underground system of steam tunnels, something of which a few derelict students are already aware. The entire Princeton system is regulated by an economic dispatch system which reads in real-time data for electric, fuel and commodity prices and recommends an optimal distribution of energy sources and outputs.

Now that we have a rudimentary understanding of Princeton’s power sources, there are two major take-aways concerning energy usage which I drew from the Princeton system.

The first comes from the jet-engine, which I mentioned earlier. The 15MW generator which our plant employs is the same that would outfit an F/A-18 fighter jet, except the plane would require two of them. That’s right. Our military uses a tool which could potentially provide power for over 20,000 people to fly a single-person through the air. It is obvious that there is tremendous potential for energy production and distribution if we prioritize our infrastructure over our military. Assuming the goal is providing utilities for Americans as cheaply and efficiently as possible, we need to use technology like that of the jet-engines not as a weapon of war, but as the potential wellspring of energy which it represents. We need to divorce ourselves from the idea that an increasingly overly sophisticated arsenal is somehow going to do more good in a world facing severe energy concerns.

The second take-home comes from a little story that Ted told us. Apparently engineers recently retrofitted the cooling tower at our central power plant at a cost of $2,000,000 to the University, generating an energy savings of around $600,000 per year and reducing our CO2 emissions by 5,000 tons per year (about 5 percent of total emissions). This hugely beneficial project received next to no notice when compared to the buzz surrounding the new solar pane array being installed on the other side of Lake Carnegie. This $30,000,000 project will reduce CO2 by about 1,500 tons per year (less than one third of the plant retrofit) at 15 times the cost.

This narrative nicely illustrates a trap that we as a society sometimes fall into when it comes to energy conservation. We tend to go for the flashy, high-profile adjustments like geothermal, solar and a host of other zero-emissions energy sources instead of looking at how we can improve what we already have in place. Oftentimes the latter provides the more cost-effective and significant benefits. We fall into this same pitfall in our own lives, where one is considered environmentally conscience if one drives a Prius, even though one still lives in a single-family freestanding home rather than an apartment, thereby creating a massive carbon footprint. It’s vital that we recognize that the innovations and lifestyle changes which will lead us into a greener future aren’t necessarily the sexiest ones.

Nathan Mathabane is a geosciences major from Portland, Ore. He can be reached at nmathaba@princeton.edu.