Coal stays on campus, for now

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By Will Wright

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When winter comes and the power goes out, campus relies on coal to keep the hospital and dorms warm.

UK burns about 10,000 tons of coal annually, all from a small coal seam in Magoffin County. Coal provides about 20 percent of UK’s heat — the other 80 percent comes from natural gas.

But that’s likely to change. UK is working on a utilities plan that could phase out coal within the next five years.

A combined heat and power plan would move UK almost entirely to natural gas. The plan is still in the making, however, and is not guaranteed to come to fruition. An ongoing UK Utility Master Plan will determine how campus utilities will change in the next 25 years, and if coal has a future on campus.

Recent harsh winters have highlighted why, for now, Physical Plant Division workers say coal is necessary.

The natural gas boilers require electricity to run. So if the power goes out, or if natural gas flow stops for any other reason, the majority of buildings, including the hospital, rely on coal for heat.

“The way that our natural gas is delivered, we could potentially be told, ‘There are other users who are higher priority from you, we’ve got to cut off your supply for a little bit,’” said Shane Tedder, the campus sustainability coordinator. “That’s no good. We’ve got hospitals, we’ve got critical research happening. We can’t have an outage in the heat we’re providing to campus.”

The amount of coal UK burns has declined dramatically in the past ten years. Just eight years ago, UK got about 80 percent of its heat from coal, but the falling price of natural gas and the worsening quality of coal has turned the tables.

The coal UK uses has a higher Hydrochloric acid content than it used to, which means the amount UK is allowed to burn has been cut in half from about 40,000 tons a year to a maximum of about 23,000 tons.

“We buy the lowest sulfur, lowest chloride coal that you can get, and that type of coal is much harder to find than it used to be,” said Mike Duffy, manager of heating and cooling operations. “We had to drop our numbers to stay in compliance with the EPA.”

About 20 percent of UK’s total emissions come from burning coal and natural gas. The other 80 percent are made up by purchased electricity and by university vehicles, among other things.

While UK will still rely on coal to get through the winters, at least for the next few years, the Physical Plant Division is working to reduce electricity, heating costs and emissions.

The Delta Room in the Frank D. Peterson Service Building is the hub for campus power consumption. The room is monitored 24/7.

By shutting off cooling systems at night and monitoring electricity in the Delta Room, UK saves about $3 to $5 million every year.

“That’s more money than we spend on coal,” said Britney Thompson, an energy engineer for the Physical Plant Division. “They save more money in this room than we could ever save with renewable energy.”

Two design teams are looking into possibly adding more solar panels, but to power campus during the summer, UK would have to put up 400 acres of solar panels. All of campus, including the Arboretum, is about 800 acres.

Solar panels that went up on the Ralph G. Anderson Building in the engineering complex   provides for just 1.5 percent of that building’s electrical needs.

There are other sustainable projects as well. Central Hall I and II, for example, are completely heated by geothermal energy. But this sustainable source of energy, which involves drilling into the ground to get heat trapped under the earth, is not feasible on a large scale for UK because of the amount of sinkholes surrounding campus.

The Delta Room has no control over electricity use in the new dorms, either. Thompson said students living in those dorms have the ability to reduce emissions and save electricity by turning of lights, turning off gaming systems and televisions, and using thermostats responsibly.

“The students have to take ownership of their space,” Thompson said.

CORRECTION: UK burns about 10,000 tons of coal annually.