As a record 31.6 million passengers are expected to stream through U.S. airports for Thanksgiving this year, travelers flying into and out of Pittsburgh will soon have one less thing to worry about: a catastrophic power outage.
Two years after an 11-hour blackout stranded tens of thousands of passengers at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and months after another blackout this year struck Los Angeles International Airport, Pittsburgh International Airport is now investing in a microgrid to become 100 percent self-reliant on its own electricity generation.
"The No. 1 issue is resiliency and reliability," said Tom Woodrow, vice president of engineering at the Allegheny County Airport Authority, which runs Pittsburgh International. "We don't want to be the next major airport to have a significant power outage or to be at the mercy of the grid and have the subsequent rippling effect that's associated with that: lost flights, lost money, across the entire airline industry when an airport has that problem."
The region's natural gas utility, Peoples Gas, is spending $30 million to build five gas-fired generating stations that will together churn out 20 megawatts – enough not only for the airport itself but a hotel and gas station that are on-site. The utility is also installing nearly 8,000 solar panels across eight acres, which will supply another 2.5 megawatts, some of which will be sold back to the regional grid. In exchange, the airport has agreed to buy the power generated by Peoples Gas for 20 years once the microgrid goes online.
The project is expected to be completed by the summer of 2021. Once online, it will likely save the airport about $500,000 a year, or about 7 percent of the airport's annual electric bill, both Peoples Gas and the airport authority said.
"It's for blizzards, it's for storms, it's for anything that can happen naturally. So it's really robust, and it's cheaper – it's really economical for them," said Barry Kukovich, community affairs manager at Peoples Gas.
The project is perhaps the biggest example of how airports, in the wake of blackouts that roiled the two busiest airports in America, are investing in microgrids to shield themselves not only from run-of-the-mill grid malfunctions but weather events that have become less predictable and more severe by climate change.
"It is resiliency, it allows them to operate, and if they can continue to operate, they can be a critical community asset," said Marlene Motyka, U.S. Renewable Energy lead at Deloitte.
That means everything from keeping gas pumps working to providing a place for people without power at home to find food, warm shelter, and a place to charge their devices.
"You create a bubble and an ecosystem that allows for better coverage of the community," Motyka said.
About 37 percent of executives say that their companies are investing in on-site generation, up from 34 percent last year, according to a Deloitte survey of 600 businesses in the U.S. Close to half said that they would be open to creating or joining a microgrid. The key reason, they say, is extreme weather.
Delta Airlines, weeks after the outage in December 2017 at its hub in Atlanta, reported that the blackout cost the company as much as $50 million in pre-tax income.
"Businesses are more aware of what's going on with regard to climate change and reports there," Motyka said. "They've got to keep manufacturing goods, technology companies have to continue operating data centers, hospitals have to function, and when those don't, that is a huge impact on a community."
Pittsburgh International has some distinct advantages: Sitting atop the Marcellus Shale, a hotbed of hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – it's home to two active oil and gas wells drilled by CNX Resources, and it will soon host three to four more. That makes building the natural gas infrastructure for the microgrid particularly inexpensive. (Denver International Airport and a trio of airports in and around Oklahoma City also have active wells on their property.)
"We started putting pieces together and saw that we had a real opportunity to put together a microgrid project," Woodrow said. "The price of natural gas in the Appalachia Basin is pretty darn low and expected to be that way, so whenever you can get cheap fuel, it works in your favor financially."
The project is perhaps the most visible move by Peoples Gas into small-scale generation. The company previously built microgrids for Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and installed generators for Norfolk Southern Railroad and a local landfill. It's now piloting a fuel cell program even for individual households.
So-called critical infrastructure, though, for now, remains the main focus – and biggest driver – for microgrids, the company and industry experts say.
"Airports, hospitals, universities, the military, and utilities are increasingly looking to the microgrid as a solution to mitigate the outage risk and improve overall resiliency," said Fengrong Li, senior director in the Economic Consulting segment at FTI Consulting. "A reliable and resilient electric system is really the backbone of critical infrastructure."
