As Veolia North America’s Kendall Station ends discharge into the Charles River it will double the amount of steam available for distribution to properties in Boston through a pair of new pipelines.
A 30-mile network of steam pipes that runs beneath the streets of Boston and Cambridge has supplied much of the heating requirements for Financial District office towers and area hospitals over the decades.
Now the system’s owner since 2005, Veolia North America, is aggressively negotiating deals to heat and cool new developments as it nears completion of upgrades to its Kendall Station cogeneration plant in Cambridge.
Veolia – which last week announced the relocation of its corporate headquarters from Chicago to 53 State St. in Boston – says its “green steam” system can offer property owners up-front and long-term savings while racking up LEED certification points.
The logic persuaded Boston Medical Center, which recently inked a 20-year contract, and Emerson College, which selected Veolia to supply its renovated Little Building dorm at 80 Boylston St. And Veolia says it’s in advanced talks with developers of two large mixed-use projects in the Kendall Square area.
“We’re being very aggressive in our proposals and we want to earn the business of the developers that are constructing projects on our system,” said Roderick Fraser, Veolia’s senior director of energy business development.
But there’s a missing piece of the puzzle that’s largely passed by Veolia during Boston’s ongoing development boom. Even with more than 17,000 housing units approved or completed in the city since late 2014, multifamily developers remain wary of selecting steam as a heating source.
“That’s a big challenge right now,” Fraser said. “A lot of these high-end condos all have gas fireplaces, and they want to install gas kitchens, so they’re going to bring gas in for that. Sometimes it’s difficult to get people to open up to these options.”
Veolia acquired the steam transmission network in 2005, which uses excess heat as a byproduct of the electricity generated at the 256-megawatt Kendall Station plant in Cambridge. The system also includes smaller plants on Kneeland Street in Chinatown and the Longwood Medical area.
Veolia acquired Kendall Station in 2013 and assumed responsibility for a series of projects designed to comply with regulatory mandates.
Under a 2011 agreement with Kendall Station’s former owner, GenOn, the EPA required the plant to reduce its 70-million-gallon daily water withdrawal from the Charles River by 95 percent. The agreement settled environmental groups’ lawsuits seeking to protect fish populations from the plant, the largest industrial discharger on the river, as it returned the discharged water at temperatures up to 105 degrees.
To meet the permit standards, Kendall Station installed massive new air-cooled condensers on the roof of the First Street facility, and built a 7,000-foot steam pipeline that carries excess waste heat across the Longfellow Bridge, doubling the capacity of steam Veolia can offer to properties in Boston. Along with a second pipe along the Lechmere Viaduct, it supplements the Chinatown and Longwood plants’ output.
BMC Consolidation Prompts A Look At Utilities
When Boston Medical Center was planning its $300 million clinic campus consolidation, it reviewed various sources to generate heat and cooling, all using the hospital’s existing steam distribution network. Hospitals generally need high-pressure steam for sterilization, although systems can use boilers supplied by fossil fuels.
Switching to “green steam” from Kendall Station enabled the 496-bed hospital to get the best return on investment, said Robert Biggio, BMC’s vice president of facilities. The hospital also is building its own 2-megawatt cogeneration plant on the roof of the Yawkey Building on Massachusetts Avenue, which will provide resiliency in emergencies. The project will reduce BMC’s carbon emissions by an estimated 8,500 tons each year.
“Ultimately, it’s the cost to put in a system and the cost used by steam and the carbon footprint considerations,” said Jacob Knowles, director of sustainable design for Bard, Rao + Athanas Consulting Engineers. “It’s a very developer-specific decision.”
Biggio estimates the hospital’s overall energy spend, $16.2 million in 2015, will drop by $6 million a year as a result of the campus redesign, including $2 million directly attributable to the new 20-year contract with Veolia and the new cogeneration plant. Veolia will reimburse BMC for the cost of extending mains to new and expanded buildings.
Veolia’s Fraser said the agreement with BMC was just one example of the incentives that the company is offering.
“They’ve been a long-time customer and as they expand, we were happy to front the cost of infrastructure improvements as part of the overall contract discussion,” he said. “But each one’s different.”
At the same time, Veolia continues to eye the untapped potential from the ongoing apartment and high-rise condo boom in the city. That means changing perceptions about the viability of steam as a heating source. Heat exchangers located in common areas that circulate hot water throughout buildings have replaced noisy radiators, and metering individual units is no longer a technological challenge.
“A lot of people think that steam doesn’t work with large residential towers, but technology’s changed,” Fraser said.
