[M T]

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the rats were the cause of this outage. To be clear, Stanford decommissioned the cogen facility in 2015 and replaced it with a facility that produces not just heat but also chilled water (sounds like a heat pump).
https://news.stanford.edu/2015/04/01/car...si-040115/

Stanford now has two or three off campus solar farms that produce electricity during the day.

Heat pump, doubtful. Probably a chiller/boiler combination. Pretty sure a friend sold the boilers. . . .

[thread drift] If you follow the links in BC's link, you get to a set of documents describing various aspects.  The heat produced from the plant that cools the water for chilled water is in turn used to heat the steam used for heating around campus.  Also, the return of the chilled water is used as part of the heating system. 
"The heat recovery system meets 88% of the heating load on campus with waste heat and reduces total campus potable water consumption by 18%." Also "
- 53% waste heat from cooling is recovered
» Both hot water and cold water thermal energy storage"

The last point means they can build up the reservoirs overnight and deliver it during the day, presumably operating at a more efficient, lower energy pace.  Where I work, I heard these described as underground ice fields.

[/thread drift]

[M T]

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the rats were the cause of this outage. To be clear, Stanford decommissioned the cogen facility in 2015 and replaced it with a facility that produces not just heat but also chilled water (sounds like a heat pump).
https://news.stanford.edu/2015/04/01/car...si-040115/

Stanford now has two or three off campus solar farms that produce electricity during the day.

Heat pump, doubtful. Probably a chiller/boiler combination. Pretty sure a friend sold the boilers. . . .

[thread drift] If you follow the links in BC's link, you get to a set of documents describing various aspects.  The heat produced from the plant that cools the water for chilled water is in turn used to heat the steam used for heating around campus.  Also, the return of the chilled water is used as part of the heating system. 
"The heat recovery system meets 88% of the heating load on campus with waste heat and reduces total campus potable water consumption by 18%." Also "
- 53% waste heat from cooling is recovered
» Both hot water and cold water thermal energy storage"

The last point means they can build up the reservoirs overnight and deliver it during the day, presumably operating at a more efficient, lower energy pace.  Where I work, I heard these described as underground ice fields.

[/thread drift]