INDUSTRY PROFESSIONAL

Controlling the Cogeneration Plant for Hudson Yards

  • By Randy Smith
  • Sep 04, 2020

Towering over the Hudson River on Manhattan’s New West Side is Hudson Yards – a cultural epicenter with more than 100 diverse shops, residences and culinary experiences. By area, it’s the largest private real estate development in the United States – covering more than 18 million square feet over seven city blocks.

Early in the planning process, the Hudson Yards development recognized the opportunity to power Hudson Yards in a resilient, effective and sustainable way. The answer was a 13.3-MW cogeneration (CoGen) plant.

“The plant is a green initiative, we wanted to limit the greenhouse gasses by burning natural gas onsite, said Nick Lanzillotto, vice president of MEPHRY Development. “It means we use about 80 percent of the energy the plant produces both electrical and thermal energies, as opposed to around 30 percent of the energy from commercial electric suppliers.”

NOT YOUR TYPICAL POWER PLANT

The CoGen plant at Hudson Yards serves all the buildings in the Eastern Railyards development. The buildings energy needs are met with Cogen as well as the buildings own infrastructure. It’s a complex system that requires a master control room to keep everything operating smoothly.

“We needed to set up a control center that’s more typical of a power plant and a district energy plant rather than a typical New York City skyscraper,” Lanzillotto said.

Nick had a vision for this control center. Well into the center’s development, he realized his vision wasn’t being achieved. That’s when he discovered Winsted.

“I happened to visit Winsted website and saw images of control room layouts, they just had the right feel,” Lanzillotto said. “That’s when we brought Winsted into the project.”

A SEAMLESS PROCESS – FROM CONCEPT TO INSTALLATION

From concept to installation, the setup was smooth and seamless. So much so, that Lanzillotto wished other Hudson Yards projects would follow suit.

“If the whole project went as easy our work with Winsted, it would’ve been great,” Lanzillotto said. “The Winsted team was wonderful to work with. From rendering to layout, to determining the right components, all the way to installation, it all went very smooth.

In total, the CoGen plant’s control room contains five workstations, each with four monitors. An 8’ x 16’ video board stands in front of the workstations. Outside of the control room sits the information room with a single technician workstation, filing cabinets, storage cabinets and a blueprint-reading table with additional storage.

“They made it very easy for us,” said Nick. “Because it was so seamless, we worked with Winstead on a fire command center that also went very well.”

This article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Security Today.

About the Author

Randy Smith is the president of The Winsted Corp.

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