Steam heat systems learning new tricks

As New York City moves deeper into its clean energy tran­si­tion, it’s not only the city’s build­ings who are figuring out how to adapt to this new era of decar­boniza­tion — the multi­tude of contrac­tors that have been built up to support them also need to learn and inno­vate to face the challenge.

Take boiler compa­nies, for example. For more than 60 years, Miller Proctor Nickolas, Inc., or, MPN Boilers, has built its busi­ness on installing, main­taining, and providing services for the fossil-fuel-based steam boiler systems that are the back­bone of New York’s historic building stock.

But the intro­duc­tion of Local Law 97 (LL97) several years ago posed a funda­mental ques­tion for MPN: How does a legacy boiler company adapt to this tran­si­tion and also posi­tion itself as a leader?

“The intro­duc­tion of LL97 was really an eye opener for us,” said Ian Rowburrey, Chief Commercial Officer at MPN Boilers, ​“that there was a tremen­dous need for action to reduce fossil fuel consump­tion in New York City.” 

They knew that in order to keep serving their customers, and to gain new ones, any solu­tion they devised would have to involve installing elec­tric-powered boilers and moving away from those powered by fossil fuels. But there was one central ques­tion that remained: How could they inte­grate elec­tricity into the boiler mechanics they knew so well?

Inspiration from abroad

Finding and adopting inno­v­a­tive solu­tions beyond the conven­tional boiler systems MPN was known for wasn’t straight­for­ward. For Jaime Tetrault, who became the company’s CEO in 2020, leading the company through this new tran­si­tion would require a sophis­ti­cated and effec­tive solution. 

Tetrault first came across the tech­nology he was looking for in 2022, at the inter­na­tional Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration (AHR) Expo in Las Vegas. It was a heat pump made by Oilon, an energy tech­nology company out of Finland known for its heating solu­tions, heat pumps, and low-emis­sion burner systems. Having worked in Europe for years, Tetrault was already familiar with the water-source heat pump tech­nology Oilon’s prod­ucts employed.

Finland is like other Nordic coun­tries in that its cities tend to use district heating to warm most build­ings. The system uses a giant central power plant to heat up water, and then pumps that hot water through a network of insu­lated pipes that run under the streets and connect to build­ings. ​“So if you want to heat your building, you tap into that line and heat your building with your hydronics,” Tetrault said. This means build­ings don’t need their own local heating systems like oil or gas boilers. 

What Oilon’s engi­neers real­ized is that by adding a water-source heat pump to indi­vidual build­ings connected to this larger district heat system, a building can pull even more usable heat out of the hot water coming from the city network before it returns. The tech­nology is energy effi­cient, using the city’s hydronic loop more effec­tively and reducing overall energy demand. 

Tetrault saw an oppor­tu­nity to bring this tech­nology to New York. ​“I thought maybe this could be some­thing we could bring in,” he said. ​“I wanted to be a differ­en­ti­ated player, and not be playing against all the air source heat pumps that are already out there.”

Heat pump chal­lenges in New York City

But New York is not Helsinki, and adapting an effi­cient clean energy tech­nology for the largest urban hub in the U.S. poses some site-specific infra­struc­tural challenges.

For one thing, New York City, and the borough of Manhattan espe­cially, has many tall, century old build­ings with local­ized heating and cooling; that is, an on-site boiler powering stories upon stories of resi­den­tial units. Changing out these heating systems for air-source heat pumps in thou­sands of build­ings would require lots of disrup­tive construc­tion. It’s ​“not just an engi­neering problem — it’s a people problem,” said Ian Motley, programs manager at the company. ​“With 70,000 build­ings in New York, you can’t just move people out of their homes.” 

This is where the water-source heat pump comes in. It changes very little of the existing infra­struc­ture of a boiler-powered heating system, including leaving in place the same pipes and radi­a­tors that bring heat up into indi­vidual apart­ments, but can supple­ment or replace the boiler with a heat pump at the source. 

Traditional boilers rely on fossil fuels including natural gas or oil to create fast-burning and very hot flames that heat water and distribute it through the build­ing’s heating system. ​“There’s a tremen­dous amount of power in fossil fuel,” Rowburrey said. 

Instead, a water-source heat pump uses elec­tricity to ​“move” heat around — capturing heat from the water and trans­fer­ring it inside to warm the build­ings. What makes these heat pumps different is how they tap into existing sources of heat. The Oilon heat pumps make use of potable city water that New York City build­ings already receive, which arrives at around 50 – 60°F. They can also capture heat from waste­water that many build­ings produce through refrig­er­a­tion systems or ground-floor retail.

The circu­lating water flows through a heat exchanger inside the heat pump, which contains a fluid called refrig­erant. When the two meet across the metal heat exchanger, the refrig­erant absorbs heat from the water and evap­o­rates into a gas. Then comes the compressor, which squeezes the gas, rapidly increasing its temper­a­ture up to around 150°F. That heat then warms up the water in a different loop that becomes low-pres­sure steam rising through pipes to the radi­a­tors throughout the building.

The quick, minimal, and effi­cient replace­ment of the existing heating system is what makes the tech­nology so appealing to NYC building owners. ​“We can pull the old boiler out. We don’t have to change radi­a­tors or piping. We plug right into the system from the bottom and — bam — we’re in busi­ness,” said Julia Cyr, the head of sustain­able busi­ness devel­op­ment at MPN.

A big oppor­tu­nity to test the new solution

MPN knew they wanted to partner with Oilon to adapt the heat pump for New York City, but before they could bring it to market, they needed to do a lot of testing. To do this, they entered into the Empire Technology Prize. The compe­ti­tion, put on by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and non-profit clean energy accel­er­ator The Clean Fight, was designed to spur inno­va­tion for tech­nolo­gies specif­i­cally to decar­bonize tall buildings. 

As they made their way forward in the compe­ti­tion, MPN was awarded $965,000 in funding to test their Oilon heat pumps at three demon­stra­tion sites, including one high-rise resi­den­tial tower. The site they found was a 35-story, 300-unit building on the Upper West Side that is subject to LL97 and was looking for a way to get off of fossil fuel-based heating. In addi­tion to this resi­den­tial testing site, MPN tried their new heat pumps in a mixed-use building, a desig­nated histor­ical building, and even built a mobile heat pump trailer to show people first-hand how this tech­nology could create steam free of fossil fuels. 

“By bringing the mobile demon­stra­tion trailer directly to the building that is imple­menting the system, building owners and deci­sion makers are able to see the scal­a­bility and customiza­tion that is possible,” explained Cyr. ​“With the trailer, you can see how all the compo­nents come together to create a tailored effi­cient plan for your retrofit working live in front of you.”

These demon­stra­tions were deemed a success — so much so that they earned the company the $1 million first place prize. 

“I think MPN has done a very good job of demon­strating how you can make the existing building owners comfort­able with new tech­nology by allowing them to interact directly with the tech­nology,” said Julia Park, the program director of build­ings at Clean Fight.

Changing infra­struc­ture means changing culture

All the buzz around the strong poten­tial MPN has seen with these new steam-gener­ating heat pumps has earned them quite a bit of interest. According to Cyr, they have roughly a dozen other projects that they’re currently designing with the new Oilon heat pumps, and are fielding inquiries from more than 60 other buildings. 

Even so, Ian Rowburrey sees getting a majority of building owners and oper­a­tors onboard with clean energy as a major challenge. 

“We feel that there are many busi­nesses and building owners who are main­taining a thought that, ​‘Hey, if my heating system works, I don’t want to mess with it. Why bother fixing it, if it’s not broken?” Rowburrey said. What the owners don’t realize, he said, is that ​“they’re relying on a piece of equip­ment that could be up to 50 years old and could just drop out.” 

His team is actively trying to work with those building owners that have reached out to them, and have the fore­sight to recog­nize what’s coming. ​“Bringing in LL97 — it should have been done 20 years ago,” Rowburrey said. But even with LL97 and other laws now in place, the key thing has to be getting the word out, from tech­ni­cians to local resi­dents. Most engi­neers in New York, Tetrault noted, have never worked with water-source heat pumps before. Creating broad aware­ness of the tech­nology is essen­tial for the team.

Only with broad public aware­ness, Rowburrey said, will people start to under­stand just how much emis­sions are being released into the atmos­phere. ​“And maybe then they can ask their building owners to replace such old heating systems with options that cost lower.”

Park hopes that in an ideal world, New York’s clean energy tran­si­tion is able to not only reduce emis­sions for the city but also provide addi­tional comfort and improved qual­i­ties of living for the city’s resi­dents. ​“Even in my pre-war apart­ment, we’re over­heated a few weeks of the year, and we’re way too cold in other times of the year,” she said. ​“Things defi­nitely can be opti­mized further with the tech­nology that we have today. So I’m hoping that LL97 becomes a trigger point for building improve­ments as a whole.”