Cities Unleash Secret Underground Weapon to Become Clean Energy Powerhouses

Companies are tapping into cities' underground networks of steam pipes as a source of clean energy.
"Green steam," as it's called, "recaptures and reuses thermal energy previously lost to the environment, utilizing advanced cogeneration technology," according to Paris-based Veolia, which operates a dozen of these networks in North American cities including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Montreal.
District energy, piping steam or water to a circuit of buildings for heating and cooling, is already widely used in many cities, according to National Geographic. There are more than 700 of these subterranean systems in the U.S. alone. But the source of that energy has often come from coal- or oil-fired power plants. "Now many old systems are getting retrofits to deliver green steam generated with cleaner fuels and recovered waste heat," National Geographic explained.
Take Veolia. They spent $112 million to upgrade the gas-fired Kendall Station power plant in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2013. The plant captures waste heat that was going into the Charles River and instead funnels it into a 7,000-foot pipeline to heat and cool buildings in Boston and Cambridge. According to the company, 70 percent of Boston’s high-rise buildings are served by the green steam.
The company claims their green steam system has reduced the region's annual greenhouse gas emissions by 475,000 tons, the equivalent of taking 80,000 cars off the road every year.
“These legacy urban networks that were built back in the day by the utilities have become, fundamentally, portals for sustainable energy,” Bill DiCroce, who leads commercial and municipal business for Veolia, told National Geographic.
How cities, incl Boston use “green steam” to heat buildings & reduce emissions https://t.co/QWFWDEPLnw via @NatGeo https://t.co/8CyE8T117o— Barr Foundation (@Barr Foundation)1455037189.0
Other systems "use tree trimmings, household waste and other biomass to generate electricity, capturing the surplus heat in the process and delivering it to customers," National Geographic explained.
For businesses, it often makes economical sense to tap into this energy source. “It’s a lot cheaper” to buy energy from that system “than it is for me to actually have to maintain a piece of equipment that would heat enough water or steam to keep these buildings going,” Chris Sherman, Boston's Faneuil Hall marketplace operations manager, said.
In Minnesota, District Energy St. Paul, which heats 80 percent of buildings in downtown St. Paul, is greening its operations too. In October 2015, they announced plans to end the use of coal by 2021. They said this will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 27 percent or 21,000 tons. They already utilize renewable energy sources, such as waste heat from biomass-fired combined heat and power and North America’s largest solar hot water system, but plan to increase their renewable sources as they phase out coal completely.
And using district energy to increase energy efficiency and renewables is even more popular outside of North America. A UN report last year identified 45 "champion cities," such as Copenhagen, Oslo and Tokyo, which used district energy to cut primary energy use 30 to 50 percent.
Copenhagen stood out in particular. Ninety-eight percent of the city’s buildings utilize district energy, and the city is working on converting all remaining coal-fired combined heat and power systems to biomass, according to the International District Energy Association.
Rob Thornton, president and CEO of the International District Energy Association, told National Geographic that cooling projects are getting “dramatic investment” in the Middle East, while Denmark and other countries are integrating solar farms to heat water for distribution.
There have been issues with leaks and explosions in some cities, but Veolia said they're rare. Some utilities, such as District Energy St. Paul, converted their systems to water to avoid the problems of steam explosions.
Still, "district energy has been slower to take off in North America because it’s driven mainly by private investment," Pernille Overbye, managing director of Canadian district energy at Ramboll, told National Geographic. But that may be changing. The U.S. Department of Energy has started supporting more district energy with a technical assistance program and possible loan guarantees.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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