A story about one mechanical engineer’s journey from the Loveliest Village on the Plains to the world’s largest medical center, and the legacy he left at Auburn where his career began.
Steve Swinson, ’81 mechanical engineering, lives in Houston, Texas, but he began his career working at Auburn University, in the town where he was raised. He was not the first of his family to be an Auburn mechanical engineer, or the last – his dad, Frank Swinson, taught mechanical engineering from 1960 until he retired in 1989. Both Steve and his brother Mike, ’85 mechanical engineering, were taught by their father, whom Steve credits as “the best teacher he ever had.” Most recently, Steve’s son Mitch became the family’s third generation Auburn mechanical engineer, earning his degree in 2006.
It comes as no surprise how the Swinson family arrived at Auburn University. The story of how Steve made it to Houston, and what he is doing there now, is a rather cool one – no pun intended.
”I originally came to work at Auburn in 1983 as an HVAC engineer,” Steve recalls. “I hadn’t been there long when my boss walked in one day and said ‘We want to put in a central chilled water plant system for the campus,’ and I had no clue what he was talking about.”
He quickly learned, though, because Steve did just that – he and his group installed the university’s first central chilled water system that air conditions buildings on campus. The plant was installed on engineering’s side of campus on Wilmore Drive, with plans to build a second plant in the future.
“The plants produce chilled water at 40-43 degrees, and pump it through pipes into the buildings,” he explains. “The buildings use that cold water for air conditioning, and then recirculate the water back to the plant to be re-cooled. It’s a less expensive, more efficient, reliable and aesthetic way to cool multiple buildings in a concentrated space.”
Previously, most buildings had individual chillers, or individual air conditioning units, Steve points out.
“Those buildings were old – maybe they had first been air conditioned 20-25 years earlier and were getting to where the equipment needed to be replaced. It was more cost-effective to supply chilled water to buildings throughout the campus than to install individual air conditioning units.”
Steve and his team at Facilities didn’t stop there – they also installed a new steam system on campus, renovated engineering’s Wilmore Laboratories and Ross Hall, constructed the new chemistry and business buildings, raised the upper deck on the stadium, built the new baseball stadium, renovated all the campus dorms, and last but not least, air conditioned Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum.
“That was kind of an interesting time,” he recalls with fondness. “It was when George Wallace was governor back in the middle ’80s, but he wouldn’t travel much so he would send Henry Steagall, the state finance director who later became an Alabama Supreme Court justice, to be his representative at university board meetings and at events like commencement.
“This was probably June of 1986 – Mr. Steagall called me the day after he had been at commencement in the coliseum. There’s no air conditioning in there, it’s 100 degrees, they’re wearing robes and it’s very uncomfortable. He said, ‘Steve, I want to air condition the coliseum.’ I didn’t know why he was calling me – I was like 16 layers down. I told him he probably needed to speak to someone else about that, and he said, ‘No. How much will it cost?’ I told him I didn’t know, and he said he would call back tomorrow to find out. I hung up the phone and called my boss, who told me, ‘Sounds like you better get him a price!’”
The university master plan that Steve recalls from that time proposed that a second chilled water plant system be installed by Auburn’s baseball field – right across from the coliseum – but it was 15-20 years away from being built. He considered the task of air conditioning the coliseum alone and thought it did not make sense to do the single building without engineering the whole chilled water plant.
“Sure enough, the next day at the same time, Mr. Steagall called and asked how much the project would cost,” Steve says. “I told him, ‘Well Mr. Steagall, we have this master plan for chilled water….’ and he said ‘Steve, I don’t want to know how you’re going to do it, I want to know how much.’”
He remembers it was going to cost nearly $2 million to air condition the coliseum, plus another $6 million to build the first phase of the new chilled water plant. Steagall told Steve to get started, with just one requirement – to have the coliseum air conditioned by next June’s commencement.
“We had less than a year; 361 days to get it done,” he says. “And we did.”
These days, Steve, who is now president and CEO of Thermal Energy Corporation (TECO), is overseeing the largest district energy chilled water system in the country at Texas Medical Center in Houston – the world’s largest medical complex. It is similar to the system he installed in 1987 at Auburn.
“In a lot of ways, I’m here at the Texas Medical Center because of that graduation ceremony a year after speaking to Mr. Steagall,” he says. “I didn’t go to my own graduation. I had never been to a university commencement exercise – until that day, a year later. I was standing back behind the stage, making sure everything was working right, watching, and it struck me as I looked out at all the families how cool it was that Auburn University Facilities Management doesn’t teach one class or do one bit of research, but we contributed to those students graduating that day. If we were not air conditioning buildings and keeping them clean and powered, the professors couldn’t do what they do.”
It was the same concept of contributing to the greater good that brought Steve to TECO and Texas Medical Center, where he is supplying energy to more than 100,000 employees and 40,000 students every day, as well as to the patients in the 6,800 beds that the hospital’s campus provides.
TECO owns and operates a combined heat and power-based district energy system that serves the 54 institutions that make up the campus of the Texas Medical Center, as well as the area’s several universities and medical schools including the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas A&M, Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Houston.
“It’s fulfilling to be back doing what I began at Auburn. It’s cool to help people out.”
