The Southeast Steam Plant, formerly known as the Twin City Rapid Transit Company Steam Power Plant, is a
Minneapolis converted to buses in 1949–1954,[1] and in the early 1950s, Northern States Power Company (now Xcel Energy) acquired the building.[2] The University of Minnesota purchased the plant in 1976 for $1.[3]
The facility heats 94 buildings (nearly all of the university's Minneapolis campus), provides electricity to cool 19 of those buildings, and provides
The plant is university building #059.Foster Wheeler Twin Cities was contracted with the U of M to operate it from 1992 to 2016, when Veolia North America took over.
Just upstream is the
Before pipes were reinsulated, employees needed breaks once an hour to work in the tunnels which reached 115 °F (46 °C). Insulation reduced the ambient temperature to 80 °F (27 °C), and the loss of energy from 10% to 4%, and over time resulted in a 25% campus-wide decrease in energy consumption.[4]
The university closed the Southeast plant to gut and rebuild the interior, and in 2000, reopened it and closed down its old coal-burning power plant.
Completed in 2005, exterior rehabilitation won a local historic preservation award, presented to the university and Miller Dunwiddie Architects, McGough Construction, Hess Roise Historical Consultants, Meyer Borgman Johnson, Michaud Cooley Erickson, INSPEC, Akiba Architects, and Kimley Horn.[7]
Among the "cleanest burning power plants in the country," the high temperature fires almost completely consume its fuels—natural gas, fuel oil, coal, and wood waste. The plant has tested and been approved for oat hull biofuel, a renewable resource that would reduce each student's fees by about $21.[3][4]
Four boilers are operational. A fluidized bed boiler (CFB) is seven stories high and capable of burning fuel oil, coal, wood, oat hulls or natural gas. There are two natural gas boilers, and one pulverized coal boiler, that can also fire fuel oil. There is a spreader stoker coal boiler, also capable of burning fuel oil and possibly oat hulls that is decommissioned. During May and October, the periods of lowest demand, the CFB boiler is not in use.[6]
The CFB controls
The unloading terminal for rail cars and its conveyors are enclosed and equipped with baghouse filters. The outdoor coal bunker is shielded from the wind by concrete retaining walls.
Environmental groups including the Save Our Riverfront Coalition and Friends of the Mississippi Inc. attempted and failed to move the plant off the river in 1996. Elected officials
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency approved use of biomass fuels, specifically oat hulls in 2006[9] but the three years necessary for testing and the approval process lost the source of the hulls. General Mills, makers of the oat cereal Cheerios, had signed a contract by then with U.S. Steel for use in their facility on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.[10]