by Abbie Leland
Chilled water plants, like the recently-completely North District Utility Plant located on the Corvallis campus, are a forward-thinking approach to supplying water to buildings. These utility plants distribute water. The NDUP was designed with modern, energy-efficient chillers and cooling towers. This type of design will bring substantial energy savings and reliability to the research that happens at facilities such as Burt Hall, the Agricultural and Life Sciences Building, Nash Hall and Cordley and Withycombe Halls after renovation.
The NDUP also replaces failing chillers in several of the buildings it now serves. This creates a more efficient, maintainable and reliable solution when compared to typical building chillers. The NDUP aids in the university’s path toward carbon neutrality and energy efficiency-focused goals.
“The more prominent role of the distribution of chilled water, shared among the buildings and eventually the campus, is that this is the first step in a long-range endeavor to switch from distributing natural-gas-generated steam to electrically-heated-water,” said OSU Capital Planner John Gremmels.
