GRU South Energy Center on Shands HealthCare Campus Is Historic
Center will meet all of the electricity needs of the new Cancer Hospital, and more!
GRU is contracting with the engineering, architecture and construction firm of Burns and McDonnell to design and build the GRU South Energy Center, which will provide multiple onsite utility services to the new Shands at UF Cancer Hospital.
Powered by natural gas, the highly efficient 4.2 megawatt facility is the first hospital campus energy center of its type east of the Mississippi, and the second in the nation. The new facility will be extremely efficient at converting fuel into electricity, providing a 46 percent savings over traditional fossil fuel-burning generation.
The GRU South Energy Center will be responsible for meeting all of the energy needs of the Shands south campus, including the electricity needs at the hospital and providing reliable standby and emergency power in the event of an electric system outage caused by a severe storm or other event. The energy center will also provide chilled water to power the air conditioning, and steam for heating and hot water, meeting 100 percent of the Shands at UF Cancer Hospital’s needs for these services. Additionally, GRU will be responsible for medical gas infrastructure for the south campus. The facility has been designed to maintain consistency with and blend into the overall campus design aesthetic.
Other pioneering aspects of the facility include:
- One of the first grid-independent energy centers in Florida to serve 100 percent of a hospital’s electric and thermal energy needs in the event of an outage.
- The first CH&P facility in the southeastern United States to use the state-of-the-art Solar Turbines Mercury 50 natural gas-fired combustion turbine engine.
- One of the first onsite energy centers in Florida to integrate combined heat and power. Use of this technology will greatly enhance energy efficiency, and reduce emissions compared with a conventional design approach.
The project broke ground on Thursday, October 4 at the site, which is south of Archer Road across from Shands at the University of Florida. Participants in the ceremony included Gainesville mayor Pegeen Hanrahan, GRU general manager Karen Johnson, Shands Healthcare CEO Tim Goldfarb as well as officials from Burns & McDonnell.
During the ceremony, the Mayor noted that only through the foresight and cooperation of a progressive institution, such as Shands HealthCare, can cutting edge energy and environmentally responsible technology used by the GRU South Energy Center be achieved.
GRU will own and operate the facility for 50 years under the terms of the agreement, and will occupy the land under a 99 year lease. The GRU South Energy Center has an estimated construction cost of $38 million, with completion scheduled for the fall of 2008. The center will begin providing services to Shands during its final stages of construction. The planned opening for the Shands at UF Cancer Hospital is late 2009. The center meets all regulatory requirements for reliability, redundancy and life safety codes.
This is the latest project in GRU’s long-term commitment to becoming a national leader in energy efficiency. GRU has established the most aggressive conservation goals in the state of Florida, having set a goal of a 10.1 percent reduction in retail sales by 2015.