Going off the grid
Pittsburgh International will loop gas from CNX wells and solar power into its own microgrid
Pittsburgh International Airport will be off the grid by the summer 2021 thanks to a private-public partnership with Peoples Natural Gas.
The North Shore-based gas company is getting into the electricity business with its first commercial microgrid project.
Over the next two years, it will build and own a 20-megawatt natural gas power plant and a 2.5megawatt solar array on airport property that will supply all the electricity needs of the airport campus.
“This is costing us nothing,” said Christina Cassotis, CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority. “This is an investment by Peoples Gas.”
The investment will be about $30 million, Peoples officials said. The project is not being developed by Peoples’ utility arm and will not affect customer rates.
For the airport, besides the projected $500,000 annual energy savings and the $20,000 in lease payments from Peoples, “the resilience is priceless,” said Tom Woodrow, vice president of engineering for the airport authority.
Airports around the country were spooked by a major power outage at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in December 2017 that led to the cancellation of about 1,400 flights.
Ms. Cassotis said that besides being energy independent, Pittsburgh will have “one of the most site-hardened airports in the world.”
“It will almost be impossible for it to be without power,” Peoples CEO Morgan O’Brien said.
‘All this gas’
“The reason this works is we have all this gas,” Mr. O’Brien said.
It’s already being pulled from under the airport campus, through more than a dozen CNX Resources Inc. shale wells drilled five years ago.
That gas will be blended with gas coming from Peoples’ distribution system and interstate transmission lines and fed into five turbines that will be installed and operated by IMG Midstream, another North Shore-based company.
The solar panels, more than 7,000 of them across eight acres on a hillside, will come from Monroeville-based EIS Solar.
When all the generation is operating at capacity, it will produce 40% more energy than the airport needs, so Peoples is looking at sending the excess to the regional grid.
The airport will also retain its connection to Duquesne Light’s grid for backup power.
Currently, it costs about $7.2 million a year to power the airport structures. The arrangement with Peoples is, in part, a bet that natural gas prices will remain low for the long term while electricity prices will rise.
Peoples, which is owned by private equity-backed SteelRiver Infrastructure Fund, has made no secret of ambitions to get into small power generation. The company has previously discussed working with developers to build microgrids that turn gas into electricity onsite. Officials said they’re in discussions with hospitals, universities and data centers for similar arrangements.
“This is the first of many, not the first and only,” Mr. O’Brien said.