1251 Avenue of the Americas
Standby Generator Plant, New York, NY

The project consisted of the design of a standby generator plant in an existing 2,900,000 sq ft fully occupied high-rise commercial building. A major tenant within the building required full generator support for 200,000 sq ft of its operations. AKF served as the prime consultant and retained architectural and structural consultants.

Since the criteria required full operations for the tenant occupancy, all major base building HVAC equipment required to be connected to the generator. This included the chiller plant, related chilled water pumps, condenser water pumps and cooling tower fans as well as central air handlers serving the tenant floors. The equipment was located throughout the building from the 4th sub-basement through the 52nd floor. All system operations are integrated through the existing building automation system to ensure overall building operations are not excessively impacted by the generators operations.

In order to meet the criteria, the generators were selected to operate at 4,160-volt to overcome the riser space limitations. Several step-down substations were included to return to building standard 480-volt distribution. Automatic transfer switches were added to interface with the utility and generator power sources to support the required equipment. Limited locations capable of receiving the generators resulted in selection of the roof of a mechanical room on the 7th floor as the generator location. This required substantial structural and architectural design to help support the 2 present and 2 future 2,000KW generators.

Due to the nature of the work involved, the building Owner required the system be able to accommodate the Owner's future needs, as well as the needs of future tenants. These considerations were reflected in the design.