Huntington, New York has proposed a $22.9 million microgrid project, designed to bring reliable energy to a hospital, wastewater treatment plant, emergency center and other buildings and homes in a busy, downtown area.
Located on the north shore of Long Island, the town’s 200,000 residents face electric reliability problems that make Huntington a good candidate for the community microgrid. The town lost power for 10 days following SuperStorm Sandy in 2012. In addition, the local hospital’s services become constrained during power outages because its back-up system lacks redundancy.
The 7.7 MW islandable microgrid will employ several forms of distributed energy, among them solar PV, energy storage, combined heat and power systems (CHP), fuel cells and diesel generators. The distributed energy assets will interconnect at PSEG’s13.8 kV primary distribution at the three locations described above.
Read about more microgrid projects on MicrogridKnowledge.com.
The project will act as a testbed for certain new and emerging technologies that can then be used elsewhere. Among other things, it will include individual, real-time monitoring of the fuel cell, reciprocating engines, thermal offset technologies, PV, and flywheel and battery storage, using state-of-the-art controls technologies.
Early contractors working on the microgrid include FuelCell Energy and TRC. The town plans to seek other partners through a competitive process as the microgrid project advances, according to a feasibility study completed by Huntington with $100,000 from the NY Prize.
Two utilities serve the town, PSEG for electricity and National Grid for natural gas. Both utilities acted as project partners in a feasibility study, undertaken with $100,000 the town won in Stage 1 of the NY Prize, a $40 million state-sponsored competition to incentive microgrids in New York.
The Huntington microgrid will include:
- The Huntington Hospital: 2.8 MW fuel cell operating as a CHP system; 2.0 MW/2.0 MWh energy storage battery/inverter system with 1.0 MW load bank (used to provide load when necessary for fuel cell during transition to/from island mode)
- Town Hall/YMCA/Senior Center: 400 kW natural gas fueled CHP system, 560 kW PV, 100 kW flywheel energy storage (for smoothing PV output.);
- Wastewater Treatment Plant: 1300 kW natural gas fueled generator (for island mode peaking and demand reduction only); 900 kW diesel generator (existing) for emergency capacity in island mode; 400 kW natural gas/biogas CHP
The contractor is the Town of Huntington. The source of this information: NY Prize Feasibility Studies, NYSERDA.
