Spectrum 1 News
Summary
If you look at Cleveland Thermal's steam heat plant off of Hamilton Avenue on the near east side, it’s clear that the building is from a different era. But once you head inside, you see it houses newer technology.
“We have three, 150,000 pound-per-hour steam boilers,” said Alexis Omilion, head of Business Development for Corix, the company that bought Cleveland Thermal in 2015.
The system was initially built in 1894 and used coal to create steam that was then piped to buildings downtown and used for heating. In 1992, the system added a cooling element.
Now, the system uses over 12 miles of underground pipes to deliver steam to roughly 90 downtown buildings. Their cooling system is smaller, using a chilled water in a closed loop system that uses roughly 3.5 miles of pipes in a system that has roughly a million gallons of water pumping through it at any given time.
As energy prices remain a focus in Ohio, Omilion said Cleveland’s district energy system is uniquely positioned to increase efficiency and provide a reliable, low-carbon way to heat and cool Cleveland’s buildings.
“What district energy does is it takes heating and cooling generation from the individual buildings, and it centralizes it into a building offsite,” said Omillion.
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