This is a steam stack
and they're dotted all over Manhattan.
Nowhere on Earth are they more common.
In fact, New York is one of the few cities in the world
that relies on steam to heat its buildings,
including some of its tallest, most iconic towers.
Our customers are behind us.
All the skyscrapers.
Empire State Building.
If you look, the UN is right up the river a little bit.
You have the Chrysler Building.
They get the steam directly from Con Edison.
I think steam's an old technology.
It works.
Been around.
Technology is coming up to make it more efficient.
This is our core business,
is to make reliable, cheap steam
for the largest city in the United States.
So, Philadelphia, Boston, all those steam systems together
don't even equal the size of this.
(upbeat music)
This is the story of how steam
shaped New York City.
(gentle music)
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It's horrendous. (laughs)
Yeah, the orange. -: It's so ugly.
I hate the orange.
Yeah, first I noticed was the steam.
Really loud and a lot of smoke coming out of it.
Blasts me. -: Well, and I've definitely
heard people that don't live here be like,
"Oh, those things smell so gross!"
So gross, yeah.
And then I walk through it and I'm like, "Does it?
"Am I just used to this?"
Like, it doesn't smell that bad!
(laughing) Like, there are worse smells.
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Bright orange and white stripes,
steam billowing out
of dozens of feet above the city streets,
these stacks should stand out.
But for the average New Yorker,
they're just part of everyday life.
It blends in.
I honestly didn't pay attention.
Yeah, I wasn't really paying attention.
First time.
First time, yeah.
So what are these mysterious pipes
actually for?
I'm not sure, you know.
I don't really pay attention.
I just go from point A to point B. (laughs)
Just to release underground, like, uh,
pressure, right?
Like, gases underground.
Yeah, like to release, like, water vapor?
I mean, by the smell of it,
(he laughs)
you know it's not just water.
Well, it's obviously Con Edison is working
on something down below, which overheats.
Especially them street tops that blow up
when it's too hot out here,
when too much electricity is being used.
Like, heat ventilation or something?
I think that just coming from underground,
the heat underground, you know?
I don't think it's anything that has to do with
chemicals or anything like that.
The answer?
Manhattan runs on steam.
27 billion pounds of it per year, in fact.
Steam moves through vast networks of underground pipes,
providing the island's buildings
with the energy they need for heating and cooling.
These pipes allow pressurized steam to escape,
directing it away from passers by.
I didn't know that.
I just thought it was, like, water.
I think it's doing nothing but sitting there. (laughs)
I remember learning a lot about energy,
but steam is never something that we spoke about.
I looked it up, like when I first moved here,
I was afraid to walk through it and like, inhale it.
Inhale it?
(laughing) Because it's like,
is that, like, noxious gas or something?
Yeah.
And I found that it was like,
it wasn't harmful, per se. But that's all you remember.
And I was like, all right.
And that's all I needed, yeah. "That's all I need to know."
I feel like steam's a byproduct of a lot of the other
energy sources that we use,
so if you can harvest that as a byproduct,
I mean, it's free or sustainable
and I assume it's more environmentally friendly.
Without the steam system,
New York would look quite different.
The city's tallest buildings would need a separate space
to store truckloads of coal.
They would also need chimneys spewing out clouds of soot,
high above the city.
This was Manhattan before the introduction of steam.
Before the dawn of the 19th Century,
the wood-burning fireplace served
as the primary source of heat for most New Yorkers.
Later, coal became the fuel of choice.
But coal was hard to transport
and proved to be a cumbersome, inconvenient way
to heat a home.
But as the city grew,
it needed a more efficient and manageable energy source.
In 1876, experimental inventor and engineer Birdsill Holly
of Lockport, New York, stumbled upon a new way
to heat his home.
Steam.
This new source of heat was not just novel.
It was efficient.
Soon, he extended his system
to heat the homes of his neighbors.
Lockport, New York now ran on steam.
(bright music)
This success made headlines
and caught the eye of New York City developers
like Wallace Andrews.
At the time, New York City was in the midst
of the early skyscraper boom.
And with new heights came new challenges.
Taller buildings with substantially more floor space
required bigger, bulky coal-powered heating systems
that took up valuable space within the structure.
Steam would be the solution.
So Andrews and engineer Charles Edward Emery
licensed Holly's concept and began their work.
Andrews founded the New York Steam Company.
Then in 1880, the company began construction.
Its first steam generating plant,
complete with 48 boilers,
was built where the World Trade Center complex stands today.
Then on March 3, 1882,
the company served its first customer,
the nine story United Bank Building on Wall Street.
By 1936, New York's steam system
was the largest in the country,
with 65 miles of main pipes and 16 generating plants
serving 2,500 buildings.
In 1954 gas and electric provider Consolidated Edison
acquired the New York Steam Company
and has been responsible for the city's steam ever since.
Now, they're called Consolidated Edison for a reason.
They consolidated all these different companies.
New York Illuminating, the steam system,
and they all came underneath one umbrella.
It is now currently the largest steam system
in the entire United States.
And one of the largest in the world.
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Today, steam's journey begins
at one of the city's steam production facilities.
Here, machines more than 10 stories high
generate more than 3 million pounds of steam per hour.
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We are here at East River Generating Station.
It's in Lower Manhattan, around 14th street and FDR Drive.
This station provides about 52-55%
of all the steam in Manhattan.
And it supplies all the electricity south of 36th street
down to the tip of the Battery.
You have 105 miles of piping
that are underneath the streets.
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You have all these plants that feed
this 105 miles of pipework.
If you look on the northern fringe,
96th Street on the West Side
and all the way down to the tip of the Battery
and the full width of Manhattan.
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If you look at all the big customers that we have,
they could equal up to about 3.2 million customers,
so people that we supply steam to.
The majority of customers use steam for heat,
but it does serve other purposes.
Heat, hot water, obvious, air conditioning,
I mean, you use steam to make air conditioning?
Well, there are different types of machines out there
that take that steam
and they can convert it into chilled water.
Sterilization, you can see how important that is
in hospitals.
And humidification, you have a lot of laundromats, too,
that needs steam for steam cleaning.
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The plant needs around 125,000 gallons of water
per hour to provide the city with the steam it needs.
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We need to work for steam.
Keep the water up, it comes to you.
But we need it to be pristine.
There can't be any minerals in that steam.
So, we actually take New York City drinking water,
which is probably one of the cleanest drinking waters
in the world, and we purify it.
Once the water is purified,
it is directed to a boiler.
Mostly we burn gas here.
That gas comes out and there's a ball of fire
inside this big box with a big boiler.
And that ball of fire is probably about 2500-3,000 degrees.
And you have tubes on the inside surface of the big box,
or the big boiler, and inside there, you have water.
It's here that water becomes steam.
That steam leaves the boiler
and goes through a network of piping
to any one of Con Edison's customers.
On a cold winter day, nearly 10 million pounds of steam
at 350º Fahrenheit flow through the pipes each hour.
13,222,000 pounds per hour of steam
is the maximum capacity you can generate
with all those assets.
Now, you say to yourself, oh,
you don't use all that 13 million at once.
You need to have a margin.
So, usually, in the coldest time of the year,
you're probably in the 8, maybe 9 million pounds
per hour steam.
Three of Con Edison's six plants
generate both steam and electricity
through a process called cogeneration.
Increase your electricity, you decrease your steam.
Decrease your steam, you decrease the electricity.
And it's very flexible.
You can move hundreds of thousands of pounds per hour
of steam within minutes.
See the stack right here?
If you didn't have this heat exchanger here,
you'd have 1200º air going out the stack.
But here, we're sucking it down
and we're using as much energy as we can to make steam.
Now, imagine 8-10 feet underground
on these big, big steam pipes,
the steam generated from this plant
goes into those pipes underground
and it gets distributed throughout the city.
And they go and they tap off
and go to a customer or they feed into the basement
of a building
and from there, it's metered
and then it goes for whatever they need.
If they need heating, they need cooling,
they need sterilization.
Whatever they need it for.
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So, this is where it starts.
(steam hissing)
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So, Con Edison brings district steam in the street
and it comes down through this pipe.
So, all of Brookfield Place,
all 8 million square feet of retail, office,
and the common area, the Winter Garden that you see
in the main area, it all gets fed from our central plant.
So, it all comes in here, goes up through these pipes,
over and around here,
gets metered by Con Edison.
They have their meters.
And then, boom, this is where we pay our bill from,
from these meters,
and all the way back into this header
on this side of things over here
and from here, we take it
and we distribute it out to the buildings.
So every building, that's 200 Liberty, 225 Liberty,
and 250 Vesey are all buildings, and the Winter Garden,
that have separate steam distribution.
And we provide it for them.
It's supposedly just for heating, for the most part,
hand-washing for the bathrooms
and certain kitchens that use it.
Some are electric, but most here use steam
to actually heat their hot water.
So, we take this 180 pound steam from Con Edison.
We transform it back down.
The buildings don't use 180 pounds of steam.
So, we take it and we transform it, basically.
I call it transform, it's an electrical term,
but in steam parlance, it's reduction, pressure reduction.
We have steam pressure reducing systems,
one for every building.
We take the 180 pound Con Edison steam
and then that gets reduced down to 60, then down to 15.
And it's 15 pounds steam that the buildings receive
and then from here, we then distribute that
and send it up a riser in a low pressure pipe
and it goes out to the building.
The buildings don't see anything more than 15 pounds.
(upbeat music)
Watch your step.
Yeah, watch your step in here, folks.
Watch your head.
There's another set of steam stations out there.
And that's how we distribute throughout the building.
This is the top of, almost directly above where we were
down in the steam station.
We bring up steam and now we supply
three other buildings from here.
So, we took care of two buildings already,
we already dropped their services off,
and now three more buildings.
(upbeat music)
So we have what we call a utility tunnel.
Our utilities, chilled water and steam
and certain electronic stuff, data communication, VMS,
but this is the utility tunnel.
It makes its way up from P5 at central plant,
up that shaft and then down this way.
And now it's going to take its way around.
It wraps its way around 225 Liberty.
And we'll show you the other steam station.
This is the outbound pass to the plant underneath.
So, it's a big network of piping that we have
underground here.
That's pretty cool. (laughs)
So, this is one of the areas that has its own steam station.
So, we take the 180 pounds steam that we distributed,
come in here, another pressure reducing station,
albeit smaller than a building,
and it's used for basically
all the heating coils for all the fans
that are located up in the top around there.
And we keep this whole place
comfortable and warm in the wintertime.
So it's another challenge.
You know, heat rises to the top and things,
but these guys do a great job
and yeah, we make it work and it's comfortable.
It provides all the comfort, cooling and heating
for this facility.
(gentle music)
One of steam's surprising impacts
can be found in the shape of New York's iconic skyline.
I've used the example in the past,
like when the Industrial Revolution started in England
and the textile mills and all those factories,
they needed internal combustion engines to work
and they didn't care about the air.
They were building up smoke.
If you ever see the old pictures of London,
you see all the smokestacks.
And I always say, when you saw "Mary Poppins"
and you saw Dick Van Dyke with his,
you know, he's a chimney sweep,
and he's all dark and the ash and it was pretty dingy.
To clean energy that we have here,
where we centralize all that power.
instead of having each building have a power plant,
we only have one big building as a power plant.
So when you look at the skyline in New York
and you come in and you have that beautiful view
of the skyline right in front of you
and no smoke, no emissions.
Why?
Because none of those buildings have power plants.
None of them.
They get steam directly from us.
That steam is clean,
the water that makes the steam is clean.
It's actually drinking water that gets filtered
before it even is made into steam.
And that steam is distributed throughout the lower,
from 96th Street down to the tip of the Battery.
So we don't need boilers that way.
So there's an issue with real estate for chimneys,
to get chimneys up the building.
There's an issue with fuel storage,
fuel delivery, things like that.
So, steam is very convenient for us.
It's already there and manufactured.
All that dirtiness is kind of out of the way.
Space is so expensive here in New York City
and you saw how big that power plant was.
If you go to a building,
it's not going to be as big as that,
but that building is going to require
some sort of a power plant.
And it's not in the building management's core
to be involved with that.
New York's centralized steam system
currently only serves Manhattan.
Buildings in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island
have to rely on other methods.
They use gas, electricity.
Some of them use fuel.
Fuel for their boilers, individual boilers.
Despite the benefits of a centralized steam system,
there are issues that help explain
why most modern cities chose other heating methods.
(upbeat music)
In 2007, an 83 year old steam pipe
near Grand Central Terminal exploded,
sending a geyser of hot steam and a 40 story high shower
of mud and debris above Midtown Manhattan.
More than 30 people were injured and one pedestrian died.
Despite the benefits of a centralized steam system,
issues still arise.
These explosions are most commonly caused
by a phenomenon called a steam hammer.
They take place when steam traps
fail to vent water from pipes,
creating a cannonball of water
that collides with a 90 degree turn inside the pipe.
When you maintain a system this vast,
things happen and you have to maintain it.
So, if there's a leak around a series of valves,
that steam's gonna work its way up.
Well, in the event that that steam gets up,
you don't want it to spread out.
And that's where steam stacks come in.
You want it contained inside that stack
so that nobody gets hurt.
And then it buys time
to get the materials and the labor together
and go and fix it.
These stacks redirect vapor
released through a manhole.
And even though they are each used temporarily,
they are all over Manhattan.
I used to live in FiDi
and there were always a ton down there.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
'Cause there's a lot of construction going on down there.
It's like a common thing down there.
Yeah.
To the point where, like,
if you're driving down there, you have to swerve.
You're swerving around them all the time.
There's no lanes. (laughs)
Like, it's just swerving through all that stuff.
Yeah, that's true.
(upbeat music)
It's such an interesting place.
You know, the career ticks by really quick.
You know, it's cool.
If we had to get rid of steam,
we'd have to go to all electricity.
Electric boilers, electric heaters, maybe point of use,
use of heat pumps, things like that.
A lot of infrastructure would have to be changed.
Piping has to be changed out.
You're not gonna use piping anymore,
you're not gonna use steam.
You would also have to determine if
the grid within our buildings can handle
the extra energy usage on electricity side versus the steam.
It's a significant energy trade off
between electric and steam.
We need to make it make steam through electricity.
It's a lot of energy to do so.
The buildings may not be set up to do that
for an easy change.
(upbeat music)
I feel like a lot of people don't know that
Manhattan runs on steam.
Yeah, it does.
People, well, people don't know a lot of things
about the city.
Steam looks like it's here to stay,
but there is room for improvement.
Sustainability, it's a big word nowadays.
But we've been doing this for years.
This plant from 1926 to probably the mid '60s, burned coal.
We swapped over to cleaner fuels.
But that's our backup fuel.
We rarely run on that fuel.
Our primary source of fuel is gas, very clean methane.
That methane is a significant amount of times,
much cleaner burn than the fuel oil or the coal
or the kerosene that has been burned in the past.
The technology that we use with the newer units,
the gas turbines,
where we take the exhaust from a gas turbine
and we use that hot exhaust to make clean steam
and then that exhaust comes from a gas turbine
that is tuned to the point where it minimizes
the amount of emissions that comes out of the gas turbine.
So, that combination really helps the clean sustainability,
the environmentally conscious sustainability
of the city of New York.
The centuries old system must evolve
as the city does.
We're looking for electrification.
We're looking for carbon capture,
whatever carbon that's left from the emissions,
to capture that.
As we push further into the 21st Century,
New York City will continue to move
toward carbon free energy sources.
But for now, steam co-generated at the city's power plants
remains a sustainable option.
Few could have predicted that
Manhattan's 19th Century steam system,
inspired by Birdsill Holly's 100 foot steam line,
would remain an essential source of heating and cooling
for the city today.
1500 buildings and over 3 million people
still rely on steam power.
It is and will continue to be
a key piece of critical infrastructure for the city.
We want to stay in business for another 140 years.
And we've been growing these last 140
and we're going to continue growing for another 140.
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