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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

> saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand.

I'd like to hear more about the details of how this worked. Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor? Was this technically legal or in some part of a grey area?

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I think it is more common than you are expecting. The University of Connecticut has its own co-gen plant on campus. It has capacity to power the actual school facilities, not just research.

https://fo.uconn.edu/departments/facilities-energy-services/...

I think cogeneration (cogen) plants are fairly common for colleges / universities. In addition to generating electricity for the camps, they often generate heated and chilled water for building heating and cooling purposes. That water is pumped throughout the campus and into the HVAC system for individual buildings. I've worked for two of the larger universities in my state and both were largely dependent upon the local cogen plant for all of these services.

A lot of universities have their own power plants, especially of a certain age. The U of M in Ann Arbor has a plant and uses the waste heat to keep the relevant sidewalks free of ice and snow in the winter.

We could always see where the steam tunnel broke from the sidewalk and went into the building because there was a patch of bare grass growing in the heat the steam gave it underground.

Yep.

The steam tunnels were somewhat notorious for awhile there, played a role in the Dungeons and Dragons chapter of the satanic panic of the 80s.

Still, there were always a couple ways to get in. Fond memories.

> Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor?

Not the person you're replying to (and never directly involved in electricity generation), but my university just had it's own small power plant: https://www.fs.utoronto.ca/utilities-and-building-operations...

I assume it was a mix of historical coincidence and a solution for less-interruptible power supply for the labs, but I'm not really sure.

University of Toronto had a research reactor back ~20 years ago: a "slowpoke" reactor.

I don't believe it generated incremental energy, but it was used for irradiation.

I worked there one summer and enjoyed it immensely!

The university I attended had large smoke stacks that old maps said belonged to the power plant. I never saw anything come out of them, so I assume by the 90s they had switched to using city power, but I wonder now if it was common for universities in the old days to have their own power plants?

The land grant universities were often in the middle of nowhere. I imagine not uncommon.

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