Built in the 1960s, the Colorado State University steam system was designed to provide heating and cooling for the busy urban campus. However, as the Fort Collins campus grew, the system became costly to repair and was reaching its capacity.
The university decided to move a third of the campus off the carbon-intensive steam heating and chilled-water cooling systems, but it took more than a decade to figure out how to accomplish the monumental task; it was too expensive to move the district heating plant, and there was no room to expand the buildings near the oval section of CSU’s campus.