10 ms·
This article actually never answers the question, why does this steam network releases steam in the streets?
by elcomet 3y ago
This article actually never answers the question, why does this steam network releases steam in the streets?
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- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- randyrand 3y agobad pipes
- wongarsu 3y agoSo what's up with maintenance? The leaks seem trivial to locate and visibly waste both heat and water. How is it more economical to have enough leaks that people start talking about it instead of doing proper maintenance? Especially since this situation seems fairly unique, I've never seen this outside the US, and could only name San Francisco and New York as places where this happens. So what discourages maintenance in those places compared to everywhere else?
- sidewndr46 3y agoAs long as a service provider can pass those costs onto customers and there is no alternative service, it can't be economical to make repairs. You'd be expending capital to decrease revenue.
- wongarsu 3y agoBut everyone is facing roughly the same forces here. You either spend money on maintenance, or you lose money in leaks. It's a tradeoff, but any place outside SF and NYC seems to determine that the best place in that tradeoff produces barely any leaks that a pedestrian would notice.
- Scoundreller 3y agoWater distribution works the same way. Large systems lose like 10% of their supply through leaks in the system but just pump more through the system to make up for the losses. Just like drug smugglers.
- kevincox 3y agoThis doesn't make sense. Price isn't set by the cost of service. You could fix the leaks and still raise the price to increase your profit margin.
- zamnos 3y agoThe energy market in California is highly regulated and the prices consumers pay are fixed by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), and are designed to cover the utility's costs, plus a "reasonable" profit.
- sidewndr46 3y agoIf it was an absolute free market with no barriers to entry sure. I've never lived anywhere that energy, water, or sewer was a free market. My natural gas supplier for example (which is used primarily for heating where I live) routinely raises prices and always flouts state law. My only option would be to discontinue use of natural gas, which would cost me even more money.
- toast0 3y agoSteam leaks is a big indication that you've made it as the downtown of a metropolis. I've witnessed it in Seattle, pretty sure in Chicago and not sure about Milwaukee. Doing proper maintenance requires opening the streets, which is expensive and causes confusion and delay, so there's some amount of acceptable leak before it's a good idea to fix it. There's always a chance of finding unmapped critical infrastructure when you dig, which adds more risk. Plus, when you fix it, you lose the street cred.
- wirrbel 3y agoI live in a town with teleheating, frankly I never saw it steem. I would say the upkeep in the US of the infrastructure is just bad. This reminds me that in Paris you can pretty often see water flowing on the street, it seems that the Paris water supply has a tendency to leak that I just don't see in other towns (but then, i am really walking for kilometers through the city when visiting paris so maybe I just have more opportunities to spot leaks).
- Scoundreller 3y agoParis regularly cleans its streets with the non-potable water supply of its two-stream h2o distribution system. Probably an antiquated practice back from when not everyone had sewer connections and would dump their waste pots on the road, but they still do it. https://parisianfields.com/2012/03/11/a-most-unusual-water-system/ https://parisianfields.com/2012/03/11/a-most-unusual-water-s...
- wirrbel 3y agoInteresting!
- pests 3y agoWitnessed in downtown Detroit too.
- mikeryan 3y agoIs this a guess? I’d think there would be some sort of safety system for venting pressure. Or even condensation around the hot pipes (which seems to be why the same thing happens in New York which also has a steam network) All of the above could work too.
- greysteil 3y agoIf it’s the same as NYC then the steam you see is generally from water evaporating off the outside of the pipes (not steam escaping from the pipes). The pipes are very hot, so any outside water that touches them quickly turns to steam. https://web.archive.org/web/20160811170408/http://www.coned.com/steam/kc_faqs.asp https://web.archive.org/web/20160811170408/http://www.coned....
- jwr 3y agoThat means the whole thing is incredibly wasteful. I always wondered why nobody seems to care about the huge amounts of energy being wasted in NYC in this way.
- tommoor 3y agoIn NYC the steam is from co-generation facilities which produce electricity first, so the steam is essentially waste product to begin with – in most coal plants for example you'd just have giant steam stacks to condense the water again. But yes, it's all very normalized waste.
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- lukeschlather 3y agoThere's an invisible component which is the efficiency of the furnace used to create the heat. Suppose every building uses a small furnace which is 30% efficient, then there's no visible waste heat in the streets. On the other hand, suppose a bunch of buildings use a single furnace which is 50% efficient and pipe the heat with 10% waste from piping. You're still substantially less wasteful to use the central furnace. There's no such thing as a system that doesn't generate waste, and the visibility or invisibility of the waste doesn't tell you how wasteful the system is.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoWhat does it mean for a heating furnace to be less than 100% efficient? Efficiency is normally measured in terms of how much waste heat you generate. If your goal is to produce heat, it isn't possible to produce any waste heat.