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Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? It sounds like the steam system is important because it's important? Do you have any numbers beyon

Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? It sounds like the steam system is important because it's important? Do you have any numbers beyond idioms and anecdotes? At what point in the maintenance curve will the steam system become unprofitable? And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.

woodruffw 2y ago
> Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? No; comparing antiquity Rome (a city whose collapse is a subject of ongoing historical debate) to NYC (a city that was built 2600 years later) does not make for a serious comparison. Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. These cities have similar infrastructural problems that they've been able to solve in ways that NYC hasn't, sometimes for political or historical reasons (e.g. being bombed so thoroughly that building new infrastructure is the only reasonable option). > And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic. I don't love it, or hate it. I recognize that it's a piece of infrastructure, and that infrastructure comes with assumptions. You can either pay to maintain those assumptions, or pay to upend them. Either way, you pay. With NYC paying to maintain them is frequently optimal, since upending them requires revisiting other, even more costly assumptions. For NYC's steam system, concretely: there's been no real public noise from ConEd about the system's unmaintainability or unsustainability. They recently agreed to a new rate/fee schedule with the state PSC[1], on which I can find no significant controversial reporting. Edit: to make it more clear: ConEd's steam network provides heating and industrial steam to around 1500 buildings in Manhattan. That's 1500 buildings, most of which are near or over a century old, that would need to have steam boilers retrofitted into their basements (or have their entire steam plumbing ripped out and replaced with something else). That's a lot of time and money in already one of the world's most expensive labor markets. [1]: https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pdf https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pd...
- maxwell 2y ago
  > a serious comparison. Sounds like what an ancient Greek might've said if you suggested comparing contemporary Athens with ancient Thebes. I don't see why not. You can certainly compare, say, square pyramids with equal sides, be it the Great Pyramid built around the 2600s BCE, or the smaller Luxor pyramid in Vegas and that scar on the face of Paris built 4500 years later. It's only been a few thousand years, what's really changed that much? The Romans didn't quite get to an urban steam system, it's true, but they were quite close with the hypocaust (central heating), Aeolipile (Hero's steam engine), and Cloaca Maxima (sewer system). > Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. Of those it looks like only Paris has a steam system. Do any other major cities (still) have steam systems? Have there been any new recent installs outside college campuses? I don't think so. It's a legacy technology, and legacy technologies are such mostly due to cost. Old infrastructure generally gets more expensive, until it becomes unsustainable. But people expect continuity and push back against changes that compromise the perceived identity of the place (like steam in Manhattan), hence most historical cities are no longer around at all.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    I can assure you, as a life long New Yorker, that most of us do not have an especially strong identity connection to the steam system. Most people don't even know about it, besides the steam cones. Again, the point is economical: the cost of a technology is not defined solely by its age, but by the cost of replacing it with the newer thing. For Manhattan, the cost of replacing the steam network would be immense, with marginal-to-net-negative consequences (larger demands on the city's electrical grid, higher emissions, waste of steam from local cogeneration plants, additional local emissions from per-building boilers). This doesn't mean that district steam is shiny, new, or particularly good technology (and it doesn't mean the opposite, either). It just means it isn't worth replacing, and probably won't be for a while. (By all means, if you want to run on the "kill the steam network" ticket, I'm sure someone will vote for you. But I think that money would be better spent finishing the SAS, IBX, and building some more crosstown lines in Brooklyn and Queens instead.) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
    - 2y ago

woodruffw 2y ago

> Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? No; comparing antiquity Rome (a city whose collapse is a subject of ongoing historical debate) to NYC (a city that was built 2600 years later) does not make for a serious comparison. Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. These cities have similar infrastructural problems that they've been able to solve in ways that NYC hasn't, sometimes for political or historical reasons (e.g. being bombed so thoroughly that building new infrastructure is the only reasonable option). > And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic. I don't love it, or hate it. I recognize that it's a piece of infrastructure, and that infrastructure comes with assumptions. You can either pay to maintain those assumptions, or pay to upend them. Either way, you pay. With NYC paying to maintain them is frequently optimal, since upending them requires revisiting other, even more costly assumptions. For NYC's steam system, concretely: there's been no real public noise from ConEd about the system's unmaintainability or unsustainability. They recently agreed to a new rate/fee schedule with the state PSC[1], on which I can find no significant controversial reporting. Edit: to make it more clear: ConEd's steam network provides heating and industrial steam to around 1500 buildings in Manhattan. That's 1500 buildings, most of which are near or over a century old, that would need to have steam boilers retrofitted into their basements (or have their entire steam plumbing ripped out and replaced with something else). That's a lot of time and money in already one of the world's most expensive labor markets. [1]: https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pdf https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pd...

maxwell 2y ago
> a serious comparison. Sounds like what an ancient Greek might've said if you suggested comparing contemporary Athens with ancient Thebes. I don't see why not. You can certainly compare, say, square pyramids with equal sides, be it the Great Pyramid built around the 2600s BCE, or the smaller Luxor pyramid in Vegas and that scar on the face of Paris built 4500 years later. It's only been a few thousand years, what's really changed that much? The Romans didn't quite get to an urban steam system, it's true, but they were quite close with the hypocaust (central heating), Aeolipile (Hero's steam engine), and Cloaca Maxima (sewer system). > Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. Of those it looks like only Paris has a steam system. Do any other major cities (still) have steam systems? Have there been any new recent installs outside college campuses? I don't think so. It's a legacy technology, and legacy technologies are such mostly due to cost. Old infrastructure generally gets more expensive, until it becomes unsustainable. But people expect continuity and push back against changes that compromise the perceived identity of the place (like steam in Manhattan), hence most historical cities are no longer around at all.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  I can assure you, as a life long New Yorker, that most of us do not have an especially strong identity connection to the steam system. Most people don't even know about it, besides the steam cones. Again, the point is economical: the cost of a technology is not defined solely by its age, but by the cost of replacing it with the newer thing. For Manhattan, the cost of replacing the steam network would be immense, with marginal-to-net-negative consequences (larger demands on the city's electrical grid, higher emissions, waste of steam from local cogeneration plants, additional local emissions from per-building boilers). This doesn't mean that district steam is shiny, new, or particularly good technology (and it doesn't mean the opposite, either). It just means it isn't worth replacing, and probably won't be for a while. (By all means, if you want to run on the "kill the steam network" ticket, I'm sure someone will vote for you. But I think that money would be better spent finishing the SAS, IBX, and building some more crosstown lines in Brooklyn and Queens instead.) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
  - 2y ago