Facility Generator Upgrade

This project included building an addition to the existing campus facilities area to host new paralleling switchgear to serve as the main emergency power hub for the two new 400kW CAT diesel generators also installed as part of this project. The generators were sized to pick up the entire South Clinical Campus’ emergency load both present and future and were designed to utilize the campus’ existing fuel storage tank currently serving the hot water boilers. The generators provide full N+1 redundancy for the hospitals critical and life safety loads, and the paralleling switchgear provides load shedding capabilities to monitor and shed loads to ensure high priority loads stay online at all times.

Downstream of the switchgear, new isolation/bypass automatic transfer switches were installed for all NEC 517 EES branches including Critical, Life Safety and Equipment, as well as a optional standby branch for additional loads as desired by the owner. The new EES branches are extended throughout the facility and existing infrastructure is re-fed, replaced, or recircuited so that all loads are on the correct code compliant EES branch upon project completion, and the final infrastructure provides a flexible and efficient layout for current and future emergency power needs for the entire facility.

This project provided significant challenges from an installation logistics perspective as all of this equipment and infrastructure is to be installed in the middle of a functioning and working hospital facility with no planned disruption of service of downtime