Same Plant, Same Tunnels, Different Fuel
UW has heated its campus from a central plant since the early 1900s. That same infrastructure is now the foundation of a $1.6 billion decarbonization effort.
The University of Washington has heated its Seattle campus from a central plant since the early 1900s. Someone made a very smart decision back then: centralize everything, run tunnels under the campus, keep the infrastructure out of the way.
That same infrastructure is now the foundation of a $1.6 billion decarbonization effort.
Pilotlight co-founder Jeff Nichols met David Woodson, Executive Director of Campus Energy Utilities Operations at the University of Washington, at the Vision 2026 Awards. The plan is to move the entire district energy system from combustion to heat pumps. Same plant, same tunnels, different fuel. Twenty million square feet. Two hundred buildings. Fifteen years.
Woodson came back to UW from the University of British Columbia, where he helped lead similar work. Asked why, he said his kids put it plainly: “How do you not go do this, dad?” He also chairs the International District Energy Association this year, which means he has seen what is working around the world. Now he is bringing it home.
What he named as the first obstacle, though, was not engineering and it was not capital. “Part of the first barrier is getting everybody aware of what’s required and why.”
On a project with no shortage of harder problems to choose from, that was not the expected answer. It is also one the rest of the industry should take seriously. Capital can be raised. Engineering can be sorted out. Policy frameworks can be aligned. None of it matters if the constituency that has to support the work — faculty, staff, students, donors, neighbors — does not understand what is being done or why it is necessary.
His team’s response is concrete. They built a campuswide strategy, then began offering public tours of the central power plant, giving people a tangible sense of the existing infrastructure before walking them through what the future could look like. When someone is standing inside a facility of that size, the scale of the challenge becomes real in a way no slide deck can replicate.
That kind of work is rarely budgeted for, and it may be one of the most important investments any decarbonization program can make.
It is something we think about constantly at Pilotlight. Projects on this scale get measured in decades, and the requirements attached to them change several times before they are finished. Most compliance failures are not acts of defiance. They are the result of nobody knowing what the requirement was until it was too late to act on it.