AstraZeneca | Power Reliability Upgrades

Heffron partnered with AstraZeneca on a four-year, phased power reliability upgrade at the company’s occupied United States headquarters in Gaithersburg, MD — a mission-critical campus that could not afford an outage during construction.

Phase 1 installed a 2.5-megawatt Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant comprised of a natural gas generator and a heat recovery steam generator. The scope included a significant site-work package to construct a cast-in-place exterior concrete mechanical yard to house the equipment.

Phase 2 consolidated the eight-building campus — originally fed by four separate utility feeds — onto a single electrical switchgear lineup serving more than 1,000,000 square feet of occupied space. Two dedicated underground 13.8 kV feeders were installed from the campus back to the utility substation, and new paralleling gear was added to control the CHP alongside the two pre-existing 3-megawatt diesel emergency generators.

Phase 3 added a second 2.5-megawatt CHP, a 500-ton absorption chiller, and a supporting cooling tower — giving the site the ability to recover waste heat from the CHP and generate cooling from it. The completed system gives AstraZeneca the ability to carry the entire campus electrical load on 11 megawatts of on-site generation, dramatically reduce boiler use by producing high-pressure steam from the heat recovery steam generators, and pull heating hot water from the engine cooling loops. The result is a technically complex system that protects ongoing operation of a mission-critical campus while delivering a significant environmental impact reduction.