UAF experiences temporary heat, hot water outage

April 23, 2010

Marmian Grimes

Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
4-22-10

Boilers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks power plant went offline for several hours Thursday following a morning failure at a nearby Golden Valley Electric Association substation.

During the outage, the main turbine at the UAF power plant was shut down. As a result, heating and hot water throughout many campus buildings was limited or unavailable. Crews at the power plant restarted the boilers and began recharging the campus steam system at about 3 p.m. Power plant crews plan to restart the main turbine on Friday. Until then, the campus is running on power from GVEA. The power outage early in the day also affected cooling systems for the university’s computer data center. Technicians there initiated shutdown of numerous campuswide computer systems and had them restored to full operation by about 4 p.m.

UAF operates a combined heat and power plant, meaning that electricity and steam are generated at the same time. The steam must go through a turbine before it can be used to heat buildings and hot water.

Employees, students and campus residents are being asked to conserve power as much as possible while the main turbine is offline.

For up-to-date information on the UAF campus, call the UAF hotline at 907-474-7UAF (7823). For current information on UAF computer network outages call 450-8300 and press 1 at the prompt.

MG/4-22-10/206-10