Military Job #10

Installation of New Combined Heat and Power Plant, MCRD, Parris Island, SC

  • Award Price: $16,931,317
  • Architect: Hussey Gay Bell Architects
  • Project Delivery: Design-Bid-Build

This Design-Bid-Build project consisted of vertical construction of a new power plant for Parris Island. The initial civil scope of this project was extensive and included installation of all new utilities to the area and building up the site by over 8 feet. Once the site was built up, over 300 precast concrete pilings were driven to a depth of 40 feet to stabilize the area in preparation for vertical construction. Once the 700 cubic yard building slab was complete, a large boiler was placed using three cranes. This piece of equipment had to be set before building assembly because it was determined that there was no feasible way to fit the boiler into the building after assembly. With the slab and boiler in place, building assembly and equipment placement/installation began and were performed simultaneously, requiring great coordination and safety efforts for all involved. The equipment package included deaerators, boilers, a turbine, a full HVAC Package, a compressed air/gas system, generators, various tanks and a multitude of other pieces of equipment. While the power plant was being assembled, new steam and condensate lines were run into and out from the site to serve the base. An administrative facility was also built inside the plant to accommodate the team that would eventually be charged with running and maintaining the facility. This project was completed on schedule approximately 16 months after contract award.

MBI performed this project as a primary subcontractor to Ameresco, a large green energy savings company. The New CHP Plant was built to replace an aging central plant with a 3.5 megawatt combined heat and power plant and three diesel generators for backup generation. The new CHP Plant is part of a 10 megawatt distributed energy project just completed for the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) on Parris Island in South Carolina by Ameresco and MBI. The overall project has been projected to save $6.9 million in annual utility and operational costs, reduce utility energy demand by 75%, and cut water consumption by 25%, according to the calculations of Ameresco. The overall project involved nearly 20,000 solar modules adding 5.5 MW of power generation. The MCRD Parris Island project overall is projected to deploy 3.5 MW of combined heat and power (the New CHP Plant) along with the 5.5 MW of solar photovoltaic generation assets. The project also integrates those assets with a 4.0 MW / 8 MWH battery energy storage system and an intelligent microgrid control system capable of fast load shedding. The distributed generation, energy storage, and secure microgrid controls are intended to enhance site resilience and give the installation the capability of sustaining its critical training operations if the local grid goes down.