Floating Power Plant Proposed For New York City
One of the more intriguing ideas I’ve encountered recently is a plan to build a “floating power plant” in New York City’s Hudson River.
More specifically, the idea is to build is a “portable” 79 megawatt natural gas-fired, combined cycle power plant on a waterborne vessel docked in the Wallabout Channel adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The FPP would have “the unique ability to rapidly move under its own propulsion via waterway to locations where critical electricity users such as hospitals and other vital infrastructure are clustered and to supply their full power requirements during periods when they have been impacted by an outage.”
The FPP would provide enough power to displace between 160 and 320 trailer-mounted diesel generators.
SEF Industries, the New York City-based developer behind the idea, submitted the FPP proposal in response to New York State’s Energy Highway Initiative. Per SEF’s submission:
The FPP’s hull can be designed to hold a 3 day fuel oil supply and can be refueled by oil delivery barges, enabling the FPP to run continuously. A very significant benefit of the FPP is its ability to service areas where street access is unavailable in a disaster zone. Land-based trailer-mounted generators are unreliable in disaster situations since they depend upon clear streets and regular refueling by truck delivery every 6-8 hours. Because the FPP is located on the water, the condition of the streets will not interfere with its operation, nor will emergency managers have to address the problems of closed streets, physical barriers, or other obstacles that have historically made it difficult to deploy and refuel portable generators.While the idea may seem like a stretch, SEF Industries claims to have secured all of the necessary permits and long term property rights the project needs to move forward.
