HARVESTING AN ECONOMY OF SCOPE.

For years, I was puzzled by the corporate name on the long-derelict West Allis Car Station that once supported streetcar and trackless trolley operations to the fairgrounds.

I later learned that The Milwaukee Light Heat & Traction Company was the civil engineering subsidiary of The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company, and it was truth in packaging: the subsidiary designed and built the power lines, steam heat lines, and trolley tracks.

Although Our Progressive Betters interpreted combined utility companies as pyramid schemes and forced the divestiture of the "Electric Railway" part, it was harder to unbundle the steam heat from the electric light, and the steam heating system is still going strong.

The oldest parts of the system date to the turn of the last century — a network of tunnels under downtown streets that were built with brick and concrete to protect the pipes. Those old tunnels remain accessible to We Energies employees through manholes and trap doors that dot downtown's main thoroughfares and sidewalks, and through entrances within some older buildings.

The tunnels are cramped spaces. Even with a constantly running ventilation system, they're hot and humid. The steam in high pressure pipes that form the system's backbone is 430 degrees, in the low-pressure pipes that feed most customers, it's 235 degrees.

Customers include some of downtown's oldest landmarks — City Hall, the Pfister Hotel, Northwestern Mutual Life and the Wells Building — as well as newer developments like Fiserv Forum, The Moderne apartments and the Milwaukee School of Engineering's Dierks Computational Science Hall. And steam is part of the plan for the expansion of the Baird Center.

The history of providing steam power to downtown for 100-plus years is a source of pride for the We Energies employees who work on the steam system, said Ted Sniegowski, manager of District Energy, We Energies' name for its steam operation.

"The history is really what keeps us here — we're in some of the most beautiful and biggest buildings in the city," Sniegowski said.

Well, the installed base, as well as the mutually beneficial trade. An urban generating station could vent the steam to the atmosphere, or sell it for central heating.

The 400-plus customers connected to the steam system are a small, but important, part of We Energies' business. How small? By comparison the utility has 1.7 million electric customers in Wisconsin and 1.5 million natural gas customers.

That 400 number dramatically understates the scale of the operation and its importance to downtown, said Paul Spicer, senior vice president of power generation at WEC Energy Group, We Energies' parent company.

Steam that's produced as a byproduct of electricity generation at We Energies' Valley Power Plant is piped through lines that extend from Marquette University east to the lakefront, north to MillerCoors’ 10th Street Brewery, and along a South First Street line that runs south to Greenfield Avenue and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Great Lakes Institute.

Were it not for the steam system, many of those locations would need to operate their own boilers or other heating systems, which would be more expensive and less efficient, Spicer said.

"You get the economy of scale of, instead of hundreds of individual heating process boilers, they get centralized service," Spicer said. "So, yes, it's small by some measures, but I'd say the practical impact on the city is pretty large."

The central heating capacity was valuable enough to the Power Company that the newer generating station in the Menomonee Valley was built with connections to the steam mains, in order that the service could continue when the older stations at Oneida Street and Commerce Street were closed.  Oneida Street has been repurposed as a theater, while Commerce Street is Time Warner's Milwaukee offices.

I remember those Earth Day clichés about how there'd be less air pollution when Big Oil figured out how to make money selling the sun, and chuckle.  Smoke, or spent steam, have always represented fuel wasted.

It's not that fossil fuels aren't used to produce the steam — Valley Power burns natural gas to produce the steam that turns its turbines and feeds the power to District Energy.

The clean part is that, for more than 50 years at Valley Power and more than 125 years at its predecessor power plants, steam that would otherwise have gone up the power plants' exhaust stacks or cooled and turned back into water, is sold as energy. That makes it arguably one of Milwaukee's oldest recycling businesses.

That's part of the appeal at Usinger's, which expanded its use of steam to power the cooking vessels at its North King Drive facility in the early 2000s, said Fritz Usinger, the Milwaukee sausage company's president.

The company had long used We Energies steam to heat its buildings, but the relocation of its large-scale production to East Florida Street led to a decision to no longer use the boilers that had provided heat for cooking. Old World specialties like kishka, blood sausage and head cheese that Usinger's still makes at King Drive are produced in smaller quantities and require less steam to heat the cooking vessels, Usinger said.

Those tunnels were built well.  Bear in mind that Milwaukee's sewer socialists took their mains and laterals seriously — as well as figuring out how to sell byproducts — and those are first to show signs of wear.

District Utility workers fight an ongoing battle with leaks from groundwater, waterproofing and repairing the tunnel walls as needed.

More recently, the utility has been making improvements to make the system more resilient to flooding from water main and sewer breaks, which have been occurring with greater frequency.

Some of the city's downtown water pipes are even older than We Energies' tunnels, and ruptures in recent years underscored the need to protect the system, Sniegowski said. The utility has installed bulkheads to prevent the kind of widespread, damaging flooding that knocked out portions of the steam system in 2020 and 2021, invested in new and bigger pumps for removing water when the tunnels do flood, and built new pressure reducing stations —underground bunkers that convert the high-pressure steam that is the backbone of the system to the low pressure used by most customers — that can provide reliable backup if service is interrupted.

A reducing station completed last year at North Water Street and St. Paul Avenue proved its worth on June 16, when a water line ruptured under Market Street and flooded a portion of the system east of City Hall. The backup worked and no customers lost service, Sniegowski said.

"It's amazing how smart those guys were 100 years ago," Sniegowski said. "It's resilient and, sure, we're modifying it, but we're keeping their legacy going."

The steam service, which was once a byproduct, might become the principal product of the Valley generating station, with the byproduct electricity being stored in latter-day batteries for use when the sun's not shining. Seriously. "[A] battery system will store that energy and release it in the evening when electric demand increases and solar production falls."

Apparently, urban spelunkers have filed reports previously on the steam system.  Nine years ago, another Usingers vignette made the news.

[A]t Usingers, they use it to make the sauerkraut.  The steam heats what Fritz Usinger calls steam-jacketed kettle cookers.

“Live steam circulates through a pocket within the vessel. It saves us money. Plus, we aren't running our own steam plant," Usinger said.

Those two big benefits are timeless, which is why new buildings are tapping into the steam system too.  When they built the towering Moderne, the developers realized steam was their best choice for heat and hot water.  Developer Rick Barrett says it’s one of the best decisions he’s ever made.

Presumably the new office towers have something other than those old-school cast-iron radiators in each room.