Issue date: 12/2/08 Section: News

Mike Waddell, the chief steam plant operating engineer, opens the door on Nov. 17 to look inside at the coal boiler, which was built in 1959. (Eric Hiltner | Daily Eastern News)

Eastern's current steam plant is in survival gear, Gary Reed said.

The plant, which was built around 1925, has serious deferred maintenance issues and could break down at any time, Reed, the director of facilities planning and management, said.

"It's such an old plant, and we haven't reinvested in the old facility in favor of reinvesting money in a new facility, which is a much better decision," he said.

President Bill Perry put plans for the new renewable energy center on hold for financial analysis and to review the location of the center.

The plant had a two-year time frame with the previous plans.

Reed said he's hoping to minimize any delays associated with this extra time by compressing some construction schedules and other alterations so the end date target does not change too much.

The university is going to have to generate steam from the old plant for the next two heating and two cooling seasons, Reed said.

"We know there are wear-and-tear issues with that age of a plant," Reed said.

"There are just mechanical devices that have run since the 1920s that haven't been addressed, haven't been renewed."

He said the internal workings of the boiler plant are unforeseen.

"I can't tell you how many mechanical devices are marginal over there, that any one of them could take us off," he said.

Reed said when something decides to break, then it shows up and then the university has to react to it. He said the university is in a reactive mode.

"We're in the mode where when something happens we're going to quickly react to it and try and salvage what we can to keep us in a cost-effective operation," Reed said. "I have no way of predicting when that's going to happen or how serious it's going to be when it does happen."

Reed said it is a real possibility that the current steam plant could shut down this winter.

"We're hanging on at our existing steam plant," Reed said. "I've already told folks that ask, there's no way to predict how long our facility is going to continue to produce steam over there based on our coal operation."

When the coal operation fails, the university has a back up in natural gas boilers.

"In that event, you guys that are living and going to school on this campus may not see an impact but we might have to transfer to a different fuel," Reed said.

He said the university is prepared going into this heating system to switch over to the natural gas if a problem with the coal boiler arises.

"We will continue to provide steam," Reed said.

The gas back-up boilers are 1969 model units, and Reed said they are not in the best shape either.

"I'm a bit nervous, and I think that's the basis of the (renewable energy center) project's criticality is my nervousness with the mechanics and the reliability of the existing plant," Reed said.

He said now the operators are knowledgeable enough in operating the current plant that Reed believes the plant will be fine for a while.

Although he said while the university is burning coal at this point in time, there is no assurance that the steam plant will be burning coal tomorrow.

Compared to coal, natural gas is probably four to five times as expensive, Reed said.

"That's an impact that is not in our budget," he said.

The impact of transferring to natural gas fuel would be serious on the finances, and would especially be felt during the winter months.

Natural gas becomes more expensive in the winter because demand is higher.

"If (the coal plant) goes down we do have a back-up option, but it's extremely expensive and we aren't budgeted for it so we'll quickly chew up utility dollars paying for gas. It's just part of the risk that we're going to take by riding along with a decrepit facility that's over there," Reed said.

He said this would be a huge problem if this happened, and he would refer to the vice president for business affairs in this scenario.

"We watch utility dollars very closely, and I would give them an early heads up that we're heading for a large expense that's unanticipated and then the administration would have to take it from there," Reed said.

He said the university would have to recover those dollars somewhere.

"I cannot tell you what options would be on the table, but we would have to pay the bills," Reed said.

"We have to keep the steam flow going. It would be ugly."

If for some reason the natural gas happened to be curtailed from the Ameren system, the university has a third back up.

"We have about 120,000 gallons of fuel oil stored on site that we can burn," Reed said.

Unfortunately, he said, the fuel runs through the same boilers that burn the natural gas.

"We have an emergency back-up fuel supply in heating oil that's stored underground, and only in case of emergency and then we only have about a three day supply," Reed said.

This back up is only to cover short outages in the natural gas.

Natural gas, Reed said, is reliable, and it's not common to have an outage on natural gas.

He said even though we have three fuels to choose from, the steam boilers themselves are the issue.

"It doesn't matter if I have 100 different fuel options, if the boilers themselves have failed me, I can't generate steam," Reed said. "That's where the real issue is for us."

He said the university will do all it can to keep that steam flow going.



Emily Zulz can be reached at 581-7942 or at eazulz@eiu.edu.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools

The Daily Eastern News encourages on-topic, civil discussion on its articles posted online. It is our policy not to screen comments before they are posted or edit them after they are posted. However, we reserve the right to remove comments that are off-topic, malicious, libelous or include excessive foul language. The DEN also reserves the right to turn off all comments on any story it deems necessary.

Comments violating copyright law will also be removed.

Users who repeatedly violate this policy will be banned from commenting.

If you have any questions on our comment policy or wish to report a comment that you feel violates these standards, please e-mail a link to the article to our Online Editor at DENNews.com@gmail.com.