A university on the eastern seaboard includes 14 million square feet of research and administrative space. It has a 35-MW peak electrical load for a total of around 240 Gwh/year as well as needing 1.2 million klbs./year of steam and 40 million ton-hours/year of chilled water. Previously, campus heating relied on coal-fired boilers that released about 65,000 tons of CO2 per year. Management decided to switch to on-site combined heat and power (CHP) to help reduce CO2 emissions to 30% below 1990 levels.
The new CHP plant can fulfill all electricity requirements; however, the steam side presented a problem due to two factors: