ITHACA, N.Y.
Cayuga Lake, etched deep into the landscape here ages ago by glaciers, has always defined the sense of this place for the people who have lived near its shores. Generations of families have fished here. And when the breathtakingly icy surface of the water warms up enough for human tolerance, in midsummer, people swim here.
Over the decades that Cornell University has perched on a hilltop overlooking the lake, this small city also has become a haven for environmentalists and “granola intellectuals,” who have added landmarks like an organic-food cooperative and the prototypical vegetarian Moosewood Restaurant.
So when university officials decided that they wanted to use cold water from the depths of the lake to help air-condition the campus, they knew they would be touching the town’s identity, and would need to proceed carefully. No one would tolerate any messing with the lake.
“We recognized from the beginning that we could do this only with the cooperation of the community,” says Henry Doney, Cornell’s director of utilities.
W.S. (Lanny) Joyce, a senior mechanical engineer who works with Mr. Doney in the utilities department, in 1994 suggested using the lake for cooling. Cornell engineers had toyed with the idea since the 1960s but could never justify the multimillion-dollar expense.
Four years ago, however, Cornell concluded that its aging chillers would not meet the university’s future demand for cooling. Moreover, the system’s refrigerants contained chlorofluorocarbons, which damage the ozone layer -- and the international moratorium on their use loomed. Mr. Joyce thought it was time to bring the lake idea to the surface.
Using the middle depths of the lake, which are consistently about 41 degrees Fahrenheit, seemed to present an environmentally sound alternative to traditional methods of chilling, he says. Moreover, while it required a $60-million initial investment, it would save the university millions more in electricity costs over time.
But turning the Lake Source Cooling Project into a reality has proved challenging. Cornell’s utilities department eventually managed to convince administrators and the Board of Trustees of the project’s worth. And Cornell launched a massive public-relations effort in the community to provide information about the project, an unprecedented move by a university that often has been viewed by Ithaca residents, fairly or not, as arrogant and high-handed in its decision making.
But opposition to the project remains as the date nears for construction to begin off the campus. Critics question whether Lake Source Cooling’s warming of Cayuga Lake will push the ecological balance to its breaking point, since the lake already faces environmental stress from a commercial coal-burning electrical plant that warms the water, and from phosphorus-rich fertilizer runoff from farms and lawns.
“I feel very strongly that it’s too risky,” says Yvette de Boer, a science teacher at Ithaca’s DeWitt Middle School who swims in the lake and walks her dog along the shore. “In any ecosystem, there are so many links, and as much as they have developed models, I think there is too much potential for harm.”
Still, Cornell’s efforts to promote Lake Source Cooling largely have been successful. The university began construction on the campus portion of the project last month and expects to finish the project by the summer of 2000.
But a small core of protesters in this town of about 29,000 people has vowed to remain firm in its opposition. One petition to halt the project has garnered about 1,300 signatures.
While the approval process for Lake Source Cooling has been knotted, the concept itself is simple. The current system for cooling the campus uses water chilled by conventional electric refrigeration. The new system will pipe water from the campus two miles downhill to a heat-exchange facility at the edge of Cayuga Lake.
There, the water will run alongside separate pipes containing lake water drawn from a depth of 250 feet. The amount of water used will vary according to the season. The cold lake water, circulating inside stainless-steel heat exchangers, will absorb heat from the campus water.
The two flows will never mix, and the lake water will be returned to a shallower part of Cayuga Lake at a temperature of 48 to 56 degrees, depending on the time of year. Cornell officials say the annual temperature of the lake will increase by less than one-tenth of 1 per cent -- equivalent to the effect of about four to five hours a year of sunlight.
The water from Cornell, meanwhile, will be pumped electrically back to the campus at about 45 degrees, to cool the central campus, comprising laboratories, offices, and classrooms.
Cornell’s project is the first deep-water cooling project in the United States and the first in the world to use water from an inland lake for cooling. Projects in Hawaii and in Sweden and Canada in recent years have used ocean water for chilling.
Frederick A. Rogers, senior vice-president for business affairs, says the system will use about 80 per cent less energy than traditional chilling, saving about $1.2-million of the $1.5-million Cornell spends annually on conventional cooling for its central campus.
That saving -- amounting to enough electricity to power about 2,000 homes -- will reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned by power plants, according to the project’s environmental-impact statement. With the $60-million price tag of construction, Cornell will begin to realize those savings within about 30 years, while the system is expected to last for at least 75 years.
Those bottom-line forecasts were key in convincing university administrators of the project’s worth, says Mr. Joyce, the mechanical engineer. “Our administration and our trustees were huge skeptics,” he says.
Mr. Doney, Cornell’s director of utilities, says a review panel of trustees hired two private consultants to conduct an independent review of the project’s economic and environmental data. One trustee, an executive of an electric-power company outside New York State, had some of his staff members work with the university’s utilities department to determine whether electricity might be the most inexpensive power source in the future, given the coming deregulation of that industry. They concluded that the financial effects of that deregulation could not be accurately predicted.
Ithaca’s local electricity provider, the New York State Electric and Gas Company, opposed Lake Source Cooling, Cornell officials say. The company even gave the utilities department money to study alternatives that would use electricity. “They didn’t want to lose the electric revenue,” says Mr. Joyce.
Finally, in January, the trustees approved Lake Source Cooling, about two months after the state had accepted Cornell’s final four-volume, 1,500-page environmental-impact statement.
The community has been tougher to convince. Town-gown relations had hit some major snags in recent years. Townspeople last year strongly protested when Cornell sought to build an incinerator that would have burned veterinary waste and plastic medical waste, prompting the university to shelve the plan. The protesters had been outraged that the university had not even prepared an environmental-impact statement.
In 1994, city officials held up more than $95-million in university construction projects, charging that Cornell could not provide adequate parking for the additions. University officials then accused the city of using the permits as a way to force Cornell to pay more for fire protection and other services.
So when Mr. Joyce later that year was faced with the prospect of telling the town about his plan to use its lake, he went straight to Cornell’s Office of Communication Strategies. The university had created the office to serve as a sort of marketing agency for selling ideas developed by various departments. The office’s advice on the lake project was for Cornell to be as open and informative as possible.
“This is not the kind of place you sort of whiz anything by anybody,” says Edward Hershey, the office’s director. “Cayuga is an icon, and Ithaca is renowned as a place skeptical of anything that has developed after the mid-18th century. We are one of the few places to have beaten back Wal-Mart.”
The university so far has spent about $80,000 on public-relations efforts for Lake Source Cooling. The communication-strategies office, which conducted a telephone survey in 1995 to gauge public awareness of the project, helped the utilities department produce newsletters and brochures. The utilities department, in late 1996, also set up a continuing exhibit at Ithaca’s Sciencenter, an interactive children’s museum, to demonstrate how the project would work.
The core crusader has been Mr. Joyce, who along with other project planners, has taken the Lake Source Cooling show on the road. As often as twice a week for the past three years, they have spent hours at public meetings and at gatherings of groups like the Kiwanis and the Trout Unlimited club. Cornell engineers also made sure to ask local groups what the environmental-impact statement should include.
The Cornell planners on occasion have donned nametags and set up information booths and tents around town, handing out cookies and lemonade along with brochures. And they have displayed visual aids that explain Lake Source Cooling with the simplicity of a grade-school science project. Those efforts have attracted the curious -- and provoked cynicism as well.
Meanwhile, potential problems that would disrupt the lake’s ecology arose during the environmental-review process, and Cornell scientists and engineers came up with solutions that they hoped would satisfy the critics. Lights and high-frequency sound will be used to keep fish and shrimp away from the water intake. Mussels that build up in the pipeline will be removed through a mechanical scraping process, rather than with potentially harmful chemicals. During construction, a dredging method will be used that minimizes any stirring of sediment left on the bottom of the lake by 19th-century industry.
Those efforts, along with the ecological benefits of Lake Source Cooling, have helped persuade many area environmentalists -- including the local chapter of the Sierra Club and the city’s Conservation Advisory Council -- to support the project.
Cornell also needed the cooperation of local governments and several state agencies, since the university had to obtain 18 permits before the project could begin. To sweeten the deal for the city, the university promised to pay for more than $1-million in street and sidewalk improvements along the construction route through Ithaca. The city also will replace water and sewer pipes in those areas as Cornell rips up the street, saving taxpayers the cost of excavation.
When Cornell engineers determined that the pipeline for Lake Source Cooling would need to cross the grounds of Ithaca High School, the university pledged to give the school free access to the chilled water for air conditioning, in exchange for an easement to lay the pipe. As a result, the school district will not have to spend $100,000 to replace the school’s old chiller and will save $24,000 a year in costs for electricity and maintenance.
Mayor Alan Cohen says opponents of the project accused the city and the school district of “rolling over because we’re getting all this stuff.” But he says the city council approved the project only after being assured that Lake Source Cooling would be adequately monitored.
Cornell also has agreed to finance the project through tax-exempt bonds issued by the local industrial-development agency. That plan benefits both Cornell, because the fees are less than those of state-issued bonds, and the community, because the fees go to the county. The university now has all but one of the permits it needs. It will request the last one this summer.
But the project’s opponents doubt Cornell’s willingness to adequately monitor the project and to put a halt to Lake Source Cooling if ecological problems develop. “They have become invested in persuading us that it’s okay, and I think that investment has overweighed their giving us the facts straight,” says Doria Higgins, a local clinical psychologist.
Mr. Joyce and others at Cornell defend the university’s environmental review of the project and the monitoring process that will be put into place. The university has hired an independent consultant to write the monitoring plans and to record baseline data at the lake before the project starts.
The project’s operations will be scrutinized by Cornell’s environmental-compliance office, the state Division of Environmental Quality, scientists at the university’s Center for the Environment, and a community group that will meet quarterly to discuss the ecological data, Mr. Joyce says. If environmental problems did occur and could not be remedied through other means, Lake Source Cooling would be phased out, he says.
The Cornell planners emphasize that they, like others, value the lake and want its ecological balance to remain, for ages.
“We live here, too,” says Mr. Doney. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to the lake.” Cornell’s aim is to convince the town of that.
