Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

Relying on meeting power and energy needs at times of grid outages with rarely used emergency and backup generators has proven to be a strategy less robust and reliable many would desire. On reflection, it may not be surprising that equipment that is only exercised for brief periods during the year, and not often tested under the strains of full loading conditions, may fail to operate flawlessly during an emergency situation. During Superstorm Sandy evacuations took place at several hospitals including Palisades Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital, Coney Island Hospital and at NYU Langone Medical Center. Hurricane Irene in August 2011 forced the evacuation of Johnson Memorial Medical Center in Stafford, CT. Though emergency and backup generator failures are not the norm, their performance may warrant more detailed analysis as to whether or not they are proving a high enough reliability factor for critical healthcare facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes. Even if generators operate flawlessly, they often do not meet important comfort needs (heating, cooling). In contrast, CHP systems can provide electricity and heat resiliency to a site—and can serve far more of the energy demands then the emergency generators typically handle. In other states and at other times emergency generators at hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities failed to perform. Generator failures affected operations at Scripps Mercy and Sharp Memorial in San Diego County during a region-wide blackout in September 2011. The backup generator at Scripps failed during the September 2011 blackout because of a mechanical problem in a fuel pump and the hospital lost power for about 90 minutes. The Chula Vista hospital said it evacuated some patients and relied on battery power for certain life-support systems. At Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego, backup generators produced intermittent power during the blackout, but no patient evacuations were necessary. 5 The blackout of August 13, 2003 lasted for just 24 hours yet, over this fairly brief time period the performance of emergency generators at New York City hospitals was spotty. " Hospital patients were moved around like checkerboard pieces yesterday as about half the city's 58 Hospitals suffered backup power failures during the black out, officials said yesterday." The president of the health network that owns Jamaica, Flushing and Brookdale Medical Centers said New York should be thankful it dodged a bullet. " This is frustrating," said President David Rosen. "A lot of applications are riding on one generator. We got calls could we take ventilated patients, can we take dialysis patients—because of infrastructure breakdowns. We deserve better." 6 Emergency and backup generators have served as a primary means for assuring the availability of power for life safety requirements and other critical needs for some time. In some business operations, such as data centers, telecommunications, broadcasting, brokerage and credit card processing the economic losses incurred with power outages demanded a high degree of power quality and reliability to provide for business continuity. 7 Where the risk of economic loss from even momentary power interruption is high, significant investments are often made in capital to insure reliability levels that are significantly greater than what the existing distribution system provides. 32

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