The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Frederick, MD Campus includes over 100 research and office buildings that amount to approximately 1.4 million GSF.  A three-phase expansion of the campus is planned over the next 20 years and consists primarily of laboratory and administrative space. 

This master plan provided recommendations to supply chilled water, steam, and normal and emergency power requirements to the future site.  The peak shaving of electric demand in addition to the incorporation of cogeneration was also considered.  The projected cooling, heating, normal and emergency power requirements of the future site were estimated to develop the optimum generation approach and capacity of each utility.  A connected load factor for each facility was developed based upon the gross area, space utilization, and unitary load factors.

The existing chilled water requirements of the NCI facilities were served from independent building systems.  Several analyses were performed to determine the optimum plant approach to serve the future expansion.  The final recommendation was a central plant approach generating 38,500 tons of chilled water.  The master plan included several preliminary plant configurations with recommendations on equipment sizing.

The existing steam to the NCI facilities is supplied by a neighboring U.S. Army-owned steam plant.  The planned expansion to the NCI campus will exceed the steam generation capacity of this existing plant.  The final recommendation was a new central steam plant dedicated to serve the NCI facilities with a steam generation capacity of 350,000 PPH.   The NCI campus is located in a non-attainment area for ozone.  The steam plant planning also included the considerations and evaluations of equipment to meet the special emissions (NOx) restrictions in place by the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).

The existing electric service to the NCI facilities was also supplied by the U.S. Army.  The planned expansion to NCI will exceed the Army substation capacity.  The study evaluated new incoming utility service options, normal campus distribution, and emergency power distribution and generation options.  The final recommendation included two fully redundant 35 kV, 63 MVA service feeders, 15 kV primary loop and tap with secondary selective distribution and 15 MW of on-site generation.

The two district steam generation plants provide a total capacity of approximately 123,000 PPH.  Each plant utilizes natural gas fire-tube boilers and includes heat recovery and emergency power.  The plants are independently operated with each plant serving approximately 50% of the NCI campus.

A hydraulic analysis of the steam distribution system was performed to determine pipe sizing, velocity limitations and pressure drops.  The distribution system consists primarily of overhead high pressure steam and condensate piping.  The overhead distribution system utilizes existing pipe stanchions acquired from the U.S. Army system as well as newly designed pipe stanchions.