Back in the day, this was THE country’s postal facility – all trains went to Chicago. This building stradddles over the beginning of the Eisenhower Freeway along the Chicago River, a block from Union Station. The other passenger train stations were all only a few blocks away. Incoming mail pouches could be sent over to this facility, sorted, and then put on the outbound trains.
The building has been empty and unused since 1997. The USPS finally got around to selling the building a few years ago – they were asking a starting bid of $300k for 2.5 million square feet of downtown Chicago office space. It was ultimately sold for $17 million to a chap from England. Keeping this thing vacant has been costing the government $2 million a year for 15 years, and generating no tax revenue for the city.
http://www.suntimes.com/6632391-417/old-post-office-figures-in-mega-downtown-expansion-plan.html
All we need now is the $3.5 billion to finance the plan
Well, this ending part to the article says a lot, “[It] will take financing and a much better economy, but George said the project is about long-term thinking. “Don’t let the economic times depress your ideas,” he said.
How is Chicago going to fund it’s gargantuan unfunded liabilities starting with the public service employees? Will the city trod the path that Detroit blazed? ObamaCare is not going to save ’em.
I’m not sure if it is being built yet, but I remember talk of bulldozing the site of the Pullman company on the south side and turning it into a huge solar power farm, a thoughtful use for valuable industrial property adjacent to multiple railroads.
I also remember an amazing plan that by putting a couple windmills on the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower), they would provide all the power for the building.
The most vibrant activity in the city is still the North Michigan Avenue area where tourists from Asia come to buy expensive stuff and convert their dollars into jewelry and $34,000 handbags
My sense is there is a lot of vacant office space, and it isn’t obvious to me that there will be a need in the future for people to be physically in the same place to work effectively
It was built in 2010 for $60 million. It claims to be able to generate 10 MW of power. That’s maybe $5k/hr – let’s guess the sun shines usefully 3000 hrs/year. That’s $1.5 million gross income before expenses. If we assume the solar panels have a life of 20 years, the payback period of this project is infinite.
http://www.exeloncorp.com/powerplants/exeloncitysolar/Pages/Profile.aspx
Here is a better deal. There are smaller ones that power 3 homes. You generate the electrically from a chemical reaction with natural gas, the heat by product heats your Chicago home, and you sell the surplus electricity back to the electric company at the regulated rate that requires them to buy it from you for a higher rate than they can sell electricity to you.
http://c0688662.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads_pdf_Bloomenergy_DataSheet_ES-5400.pdf
Let’s see – .66 MM btu = 100 Kw
Natural gas has ~1000 btu/cubic foot – so .66 MM btu = 660 cubic feet
Average residential cost is $12.62 per Mcf so that is $8.32 per hour to generate 100 Kw per hour, or .08 per kwh, compared with .12 as the average for electricity.
Note the power is described as base load – you can’t quickly speed up or slow down the reaction. Being able to store energy is in a future model. Output is 480v, so you’ll need to step down the voltage. It does put out a lot of carbon monoxide
Sounds like a great stock for an IPO until an actual unit is sold outside a lab environment and meets the real world. The main advantage seems to be capturing government tax incentives.
The company has $1.03 billion in negative retained earnings – on sales of $42 million in 1Q 2013, it had an operating loss of $61 million
That’s almost as good as radio!
Refining the math – the fact sheet says it makes 14,000 Mwh of power a year – the wholesale rate in NW Indiana is from $30-50 per MWh, so that makes it around $560k a year, so the payback period is now 3x infinity
What would be the environmental impact on the city’s pigeons if there were to be a windmill? heck, let’s also hire some cronies to study the impact on bees and honey.
You don’t want to be hit by a bird falling 1000 feet.
The “green” project seems stalled – they put in a few photovoltaic cells inside window panes to test the concept Someone then realized the sun only really hits the equivalent of one side of the building at any time, that windows on the lower floors don’t see the sun at all because of nearby buildings, and tenants might object to their views being obstructed by horizontal wires.
We have it far worse in NJ. The government mandates that all power companies sell power that contains a certain percentage of it power made with the infinite payback way, so rates have gone up for power generation.
Then they had a scheme that instead of installing solar panels in a large flat array, on a field or a rood, they would install one pizza box sized cell on each telephone pole – the idea was to spend more on climbing up and down the poles than on the solar cell itself.
How pays for the pizza box cells on the telephone poles? Well, my “Distribution” part of the bill went up because the accountants call that distribution rather than generating electricity.
My favorite winter pictures are when they are all covered with snow.
Here is a picture. Note how it impacts the driving experience and distractions for drivers from looking at the road:
http://inspectapedia.com/electric/Solar_Lights_Haddonfield_NJ_164_DJFs.jpg
A DHS center to gather people for shipment to an extermination camp might work. My CFR newsletter yesterday announced that human life has now exceeded the capacity of the planet and made a comparison to bacteria colonies. The globalists are ready to administer the antibiotics.
I found the place – it’s on 120th near Peoria, adjacent to the Metra Electra Blue Island branch, an interesting little piece of commuter railway. It’s aligned different than I expected – the arrays are in a row aligned from north to south, to follow the sun I guess, but with a large area between each row. I sort of expected them to be angled like in the picture and in an east/west row facing South toward the sun. I guess that’s why I’m not in the solar power business.
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