Editor’s Note: This interview has been condensed for clarity.
On Jan. 21, The Oakland Post was invited for an exclusive tour of the Central Heating Plant (CHP) and a sit-down interview with Oakland University administrators and facility managers.
The tour marks the third week of the new winter semester, following the campus closure from Thanksgiving break to the new year due to multiple leaks in the High Temperature Hot Water (HTHW) system.
The tour was led by Randy Powell, heating plant supervisor, Stephen W. Mackey, senior vice president for finance and administration, and Siraj Khan, associate vice president for facilities management.
“What I hope people get out of this today is that they can see the complexity of this whole operation and also get an appreciation for that. We’re here, 24/7, 365; there are no days off. There are no minutes off,” Mackey said. “We do have monitoring on all the buildings.”
The tour started with a breakdown of the facility and its cogeneration unit, which generates electricity and thermal energy from a single fuel source.
“Our cogeneration unit, actually, there’s a turbine in there and we use the waste heat from the exhaust off that turbine, about 1,000 degrees,” Powell said. “We use that to heat our hot water for utility usage on campus. It also has a 4.6 megawatt generator on the backside of it that creates about 60% of our electrical demand on campus on a yearly basis.”
In addition to a cogeneration unit, the facility also employs a duct burner as a secondary heating option.
“We also have another piece of equipment. It’s called a waste heat recovery unit, or a duct burner – we call it. There’s a three-stage boiler inside there, so if that 1,000 degrees exhaust off the gas-fired turbine isn’t enough to meet our campus demand, we have the duct burner on that gives us three additional stages of heat and another several 100 degrees to meet our demand,” Powell said. “We have a loop here in the plant that constantly circulates and that water is pulled off of that bridge and then distributed through the system, pumps underground, through all the to all the buildings on campus.”
The water from the CHP leaves the facility at 260 degrees to reach a water-to-water heat exchanger, lowering it to 170 degrees, allowing it to run through air machines, perimeter heating and variable air value boxes in all buildings.
“So we’re basically taking that heat off take and we’re heating up the water to run all the boilers on campus,” Mackey said.
The Oakland Post: How did the operations look different during the pipe leaks?
“Leading up to our shutdown for repair, we were actually adding quite a lot of makeup water every day because of the leak – that’s how we kept the plant online. We were upwards of 9,000 [makeup] gallons a day on average at that time, until we had all the parts, pieces and labor force in place to do the repair,” Powell said.
“Once we shut the plant down, all of our heat-generating equipment went down, but we still monitored the buildings out there. We have eight operators here that work around the clock, three different shifts and we were doing some maintenance out on campus for all of our equipment out there. We’re not only responsible for what’s here in the plant, we’re responsible for all of our high temp hot water distribution system valves, everything out all over campus and I had the guys working on that, plus doing some maintenance here in the plant, plus working with the repair crew to do some draining and then refilling and things like that. So we stayed pretty busy during that shutdown,” Powell said.
“It was definitely a challenge that none of us have ever had to go through before, even the gentleman that just walked in here, he’s been here the longest, almost 20 years and never had anything like this happen before,” Powell said.
The Oakland Post: Are there any lessons learned from that, or anything that would have helped the process?
“The biggest thing is … we knew the system needed to be upgraded. We had it on our master plan to do in phase one. It didn’t wait for us,” Mackey said. “And so it’s not shocking it happened. It’s just a really unfortunate moment in time when it did happen and we tried to mitigate that risk by going with the Thanksgiving week. And unfortunately, a new leak popped up and then another and it just became this domino effect. And we’ve got it all controlled now.”
The Oakland Post: Were there any signs before Thanksgiving that there might be a leak, or even years before, were there any pointers?
“We knew that there was a leak. It wasn’t big – there’s leaks all over the place,” Mackey said. “Siraj calls me, he’s like, ‘we got a problem,’ because the leak had become a leak – like 9,000 gallons a day is pouring out of the leak where it was a lot less before that. So clearly, the crack was getting bigger. That was in October and that’s when we went into the emergency planning of ‘can we wait until winter break to do this?’ That was the big question.”
With a forecast warning of colder days earlier than usual in the year, Mackey explained, the OU administration did not feel comfortable waiting until the end of Fall 2025 to bring the heating system offline.
Powell explained some of the factors that contributed to the leaks that followed the initial rupture.
“Typically, in this system here, we add makeup water every day. We have to because … this is a very complicated system and we have leaks,” Powell said. “We also have something called expansion and contraction and evaporation. So a lot of that water will evaporate, so we have to add — we have to keep water in our system so that we keep our system viable.”
An increase in the demand for makeup water to maintain the facility running hinted at a leak.
“My operators came to me and said, ‘Hey, I think we have a leak. We’re using more water than we normally do,’ and that was up and around the 2000-gallon range in a 24-hour period. So myself [and] one of my operators, we went looking. We didn’t find it where we thought we might find it. So we decided to go down in the tunnel,” Powell said. “When we got to the 2000-gallon range, is when it was determined that we really had a leak we needed to address ASAP. The problem, as Steve mentioned, is it didn’t wait for us. It had its own agenda and that leak, that crack in that pipe, just got bigger and bigger and bigger and we did very well keeping up with it for as long as we did. It was almost a month that we were adding, three weeks to a month, roughly, that we were adding all that water, keeping this plant alive. It was a phenomenal feat.” Powell said.
“Our water bill is going to go way up,” Mackey said, with no billing number yet. The CHP has been saving about $2.5 million a year in energy costs, he explained.
The Oakland Post: With keeping the CHP going, are there any renovation plans?
“We are planning the acceleration of some of our most critical loops points because this section of pipe is kind of all the same age – it tells you that there’s potential failures in there,” Mackey said. “Our priority right now is to get redundant boilers in all the buildings. So you saw it in housing, you can see it out on the sidewalk. There’s a temporary one out there. Housing is fully independent [of] this plant. Now we can heat housing without this plant.”
The redundant systems allow for flexible repairs and updates to the HTHW system, he explained, with the mobile heating units and gas tanks as a secondary backup plan.
“This is also part of our longer-term design around our sustainability plans. So what this is, is kind of just changed the order in which things were going to happen. So it’s moved us up,” Mackey said.
With rainwater usually draining into the tunnels, it was difficult to discern if the leak was an infrastructure problem or the regular storm rain, Khan added.
“The leak was not very obvious by the visual, looking at that – the leak was in the underground pipe, which is outside of the tunnel. There is no way you can see it visually. So that was another struggle there,” Khan said. “Even though we brought the companies in the past to detect something like that. But these underground pipes are buried, like 12 feet underground and there is no way they can really detect that. And it’s about, it’s about 55 plus year old underground piping
The Oakland Post: Are there any plans to renovate those really old sections of the pipes? What does that look like?
“The old section, we have replaced roughly 40% of the old section already on campus, time by time as we get the funding,” Khan said. “We are constantly replacing the old section.”
The Oakland Post: Is the weather this week and as we go into the little extreme weather days, posing any challenges?
“Typically, when we’re 20 degrees or less, we’ll ramp our output here. We’ll raise our output temperature up 10 to 15 degrees. Well, in this case, we’re currently not doing that. We’ve lowered our system pressure on our piping system, because now we know that it has some deficiencies and we’re trying to preserve it until all these redundant boilers and everything get installed so that they can prepare us for repairs,” Powell said.
Buildings like Hanna Hall, Dodge and the Math and Science Center, the farthest away from the CHP, might experience some cold areas. Systems like a steam cap system that prevents the water from boiling and roiling help maintain the system under control even during extreme weather.
“All those occupants in those buildings, students, staff, faculty, everybody,” Powell said. “Those are our customers and we treat them as good as we can with what we’ve got. So we’re doing the best we can and we really haven’t had a lot of complaints.”
The Oakland Post: Last time we talked, $1.1 million was the projected expenditure. Has it gone up?
“For the leaks and the refunds we gave for student housing and some of the other things. So that three-week period cost us just over $5 million; the redundant heat is significantly more,” Mackey said.
The Oakland Post: A lot of people have been asking about the gas tanks outside of the buildings, in the parking lot. Are those a safety concern?
“When we went through that shutdown and it started getting really cold, all those assets were brought in from all over the Midwest, Ohio, Indiana, all over Michigan – we drained every rentable asset in the region. We’re keeping them here in case we have a failure. Because if we can’t heat the buildings above about 35 degrees… we will [have] what we call ‘losing the building,’ meaning the sprinklers, the fire sprinkler system, will freeze, but all the plumbing in the building will freeze — You’re gonna end up with breaks and everything else. Miraculously, we did not have one freeze break,” Mackey said. “What you’re going to see is as we get the buildings, the redundancy put in place, that equipment will start to disappear.”
