Upgrading Emergency Power

Jerry Ogan, PE, SASHE

Summary
In 2001 St. Francis Hospital (SFH) initiated a major expansion program.  This program includes the addition of a parking garage, an expansion of the Hospital to upgrade our surgical suite, emergency and sterile processing departments, plus a new attached atrium connecting a new medical office building to the Hospital.  In the middle of the planning process for the new construction project, a new requirement to connect certain imaging equipment to the emergency generators caused engineering and administration to put considerable thought into how we were going to respond to the increased needs of our emergency power supply system.  Obviously, the primary goal for upgrading the emergency generators is to provide a quality environment for providing patient care and to protect the health and well-being of our staff and visitors through supporting the life safety systems.  However, there remains the fiscal responsibility to the organization in making any extensive changes.  When considering the need to upgrade the emergency generators it meant either re-sizing as well as potentially expanding the number of units, hence the choice of terminology.  In our opinion there were two choices available - 1) expand the Central Energy Plant (CEP) containing the existing two generators to accommodate a third generator of the same size, or, 2) increase the capacity of the existing two units to handle the new connected load.  The current configuration is one, which provides for total redundancy of emergency power operation, that is, the full emergency power demand is supplied by only one of the emergency generators.  Therefore, the first choice of adding an additional generator set appeared to be the simple solution, but the second option produced a number of questions that had to be explored.  The approach we used involved considering the needs of the organization (both current and expanded), the desired additional connection of existing equipment, the implied needs imposed by the expansion project, rules and regulations, energy conservation and redundancy.

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