Faculty, staff and students are invited to take a close look at the utility plant at an open house today (Thursday, May 29). The open house will run from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. at the plant, located at 40th Street and Dewey Avenue.
Over the past year and a half, on the corner of 40th and Dewey, the campus has seen the transformation of a parking lot into a “state of the art” East Utility Plant.
Central utilities can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but generally it means combining the heating or cooling needs of several facilities into a central location and a single, or small number, of large pieces of generation equipment to improve efficiency and reliability.
On the UNMC/NHS campus, it means a central chilled water system to cool the campus buildings in the summer, a central steam boiler plant to heat the buildings in the winter, a central 13,800-volt normal electrical distribution system to power the campus buildings, and a 4,160-volt emergency power generation and distribution system to power critical building functions during any loss of normal campus power.
Before construction of the new east plant, all of these campus functions were served by the existing Central Utility Plant, located on Emile Street across the street from the Lied Transplant Center. The new East Utility Plant is not intended to replace the existing central plant, but rather to supplement the existing facility to support the rapidly growing campus utility demands created by the construction of new buildings on campus.
“In general, it is a good thing that most people don’t recognize the central utility systems on campus because that means that the systems have been working” said Nick Combs, UNMC manager of Campus Maintenance and Utilities. “In utility systems, you usually get recognized only when something goes wrong. Most people simply expect the lights to turn on and the heating and cooling systems to work — they tend to not recognize when things are going OK, and that’s the way we would like to keep it!”
The East Utility Plant has taken the theme of “do what you need to do but don’t make a lot of noise about it” to the heart of its design. By utilizing specially design acoustical equipment, the 2,300-horsepower diesel engine generator located in the East plant is not even noticeable to the neighborhood when it is operating. Similarly, cooling tower systems used to support the plant chilled water generation that are notoriously noisy and obnoxious have also been specifically selected to minimize those undesirable traits.
“It’s all part of being a good neighbor.” said Dan Michalak, campus electrical engineer who coordinated the construction of the facility. “Minimizing neighborhood noise, optimizing energy efficiency, minimizing operational cost, and highly reliable equipment were all critical design parameters that had to be met when we designed the facility”.
Another of plant’s features is a 45-person seminar room, which serves as a “hands-on” engineering lab for engineering students at the UNO Peter Kiewit Institute to learn about utility plant design and operations. To a layperson, the East Utility Plant’s “volt” and “kilowatt” and “ton” numbers may not mean a lot, but it’s the jargon of the engineers that build these kinds of facilities. Take some time this afternoon and stop by to see how it all works; they say it’s really quite fascinating!