by Darv Johnson ’ 93
Visit the University’s cogener- ation facility on Cameron Avenue, and you don’t have to look too hard to find coal. No surprise there. After all, the plant burns more
than 100,000 tons of it a year.
Those rail cars over there? Full of coal, 100
tons apiece. Each of those two soaring silos can
hold up to 5,000 tons. That hill over there, all
covered in grass — it’s the emergency coal supply. And if you want to see the stuff doing what
it was brought here to do, look through a small
port into one of the plant’s boilers: coal, burning at about 1,600 degrees, an inferno that
stacks up 85 feet high inside the boiler walls, all
to bring steam and electricity to a campus that
sprawls over some 50 percent more square feet
than it did 10 years ago. (“Cogeneration” in
Carolina’s case is the simultaneous production
of steam and electricity.)
What does take some work, given the coal
all around you, is to imagine this plant burning
something else. Making all that coal disappear —
and finding a suitable replacement — is the
challenge facing the University’s energy experts
after Chancellor Holden Thorp ’ 86 announced
in May that the use of coal on campus will end
by 2020.
In making this commitment, UNC joins a
number of other universities around the coun-
try that are struggling to shrink their carbon
footprint by converting their coal-fired power
plants to cleaner technologies. But it also steps
out of the comfortable shadow of coal —
which, for all its carbon content, is at least a
known quantity — and into a world where
leading fuel alternatives such as biomass often
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