A hospital in Victoria, Texas, later this month will announce commissioning of a new microgrid, likely to be one of the first healthcare microgrid to come on line during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of course, the timing is fortuitous — Citizens Medical Center announced plans to install the 2.8 MW microgrid long before the pandemic, about a year ago, spurred by a different disaster, Hurricane Harvey.
But the project stands out because it will draw attention at a time when the argument is likely to intensify for microgrids at critical facilities, such as hospitals, community shelters, grocery stores and data centers. Power outages could be catastrophic in places where the pandemic has put these facilities under extreme pressure, especially if utility crews are spread thin.
Citizens learned what it’s like to face a power outage with only emergency generators when Harvey hit Texas in August 2017. The back-up system provided only enough capacity to support the equipment, life safety and critical loads required for regulatory compliance — a common circumstance in hospitals. As a result, the hospital had to evacuate patients.
Built in partnership with Texas-based Enchanted Rock, the new natural gas microgrid will keep the hospital fully powered during a grid failure.
The project is also providing cost and environmental benefits for the hospital.
The healthcare microgrid will operate under Enchanted Rock’s resiliency-as-a-service offering, which allows hosts to pay a fraction of what they would pay if they owned the microgrid outright. For this installation, Citizens only paid 20% of the total cost of ownership.
Enchanted Rock is able to do this because it leverages the microgrid for use by the grid when the hospital does not need its backup power. The company aggregates microgrid systems and sells their output to the grid to earn revenue that subsidizes the cost of the systems.
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