Kitty Hawk Peaking Station
The Philadelphia Navy Yard is a 1200-acre campus of thriving businesses, and one of the largest private microgrids in the United States. The Kitty Hawk project is an 8 MW natural gas-fired peaking plant that serves as the anchor for this microgrid, and Newtility was responsible for developing it’s control systems.
Project Highlights
- Control Systems Engineering
- Genset control & integration
- Substation Automation
- Testing & commissioning
The Challenge
This power plant is the largest on-site generation within the Navy Yard’s microgrid, and thus critical to it’s success. A variety of use cases needed to be accounted for, including automated peak shaving, PJM market participations, and emergency conditions.
Further compounding the challenge, the various use cases required automated operation of the project from several separate external systems. Thus, the control system integration efforts would be particularly difficult, and crucial for reliable operation of the Navy Yard’s power system.
Our Solution
Newtility led the project team through designing a reliable, flexible control system that met all of the project’s unusual needs. Our responsibilities included:
- Control system concept and algorithm development
- PLC control panel design and programming
- HMI application development
- Genset control & integration
- Substation Integration
- RTU programming
- Integration with three separate “upstream” SCADA platforms
- Meter programming & integration
- Process instrumentation configuration & testing
- On-site startup & commissioning
The project was a great success, and Newtility continues to be involved in this project and the Navy Yard with ongoing operations and project support.