THE CENTRAL OFFICE OF THE FUTURE

Verizon has an eye on the future — at least in terms of powering a central office with what it's calling a highly reliable, environmentally sound energy source. The company has built — and is successfully operating — what it and its fuel cell supplier are billing as the largest fuel cell pilot project of its kind in the country to power its 35,000-line CO in Garden City, N.Y.

“It took us several years to design and implement this project, and we did it to get more familiarity with fuel cells and to help move along the fuel cell industry,” said Jeremy Metz, energy group manager for Verizon Strategic Sourcing. “What we did here was to take seven fuel cells — nobody's ever done seven fuel cells before — pair it up with existing engines, design how to capture the waste heat, both for winter and for summer, and put it all in a system that requires impeccable reliability.”

The facility, which contains some Verizon administrative offices and one of the company's regional Network Surveillance Operations Centers, uses seven UTC Power PureCell 200 fuel cells, each of which can generate 200 kilowatts of electrical power per hour, powered with piped-in natural gas. Instead of burning the gas, the hydrogen atoms are detached from it as it's fed into the cells and then combined with oxygen atoms from the air to generate direct current (DC) electrical power.

Heat and water byproduct are taken from each fuel cell, and DC is converted to alternating current (AC) electricity to power, heat and cool the building. The CO will stay connected to the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) grid, but will take a minimal amount of power from it. It also will rely on battery backup power during peak load times. The fuel cell units have the ability to operate as a hybrid system with diesel and bi-fuel gas/diesel reciprocating engines that can generate a total of 4.4 megawatts of power.

Starting June 1 every year, the system goes into summer mode in agreement with LIPA, which means that a bi-fueled engine runs parallel to the grid along with the fuel cells in order to reduce supplemental grid power requirements during peak-demand summer months.

Metz said there are many advantages to this kind of configuration. Using fuel cells reduces the CO's dependence on commercial power, and Verizon estimates it will save $250,000 annually in commercial power costs. The system is environmentally friendly as well because the only by-products of the energy the fuel cells generate are water and heated moist air, which Verizon is harnessing to heat and cool the 292,000 square-foot building. Since the bi-fueled engines run on natural gas and diesel, in the event that either of these fuels cannot be procured, the system will be able to run on the other fuel, increasing runtime and reliability.

Metz stresses that the energy cost savings isn't really why Verizon chose to implement the project, as the current cost of alternative energies is more expensive than getting power through more traditional methods.

“By our taking the lead here, it will make it easy for others, both inside of telecom and outside of telecom, to look at the model here and see how it works,” Metz said.

A UTC Power spokeswoman said the grid-connected PureCell 200 solution used in the project also has been used successfully in a variety of applications, including a police station, hospital, casino and bank, but the Verizon project is the company's first in telecom and uses the largest number of the cells.

The project was funded, in part, through Department of Energy grants of about $3.2 million and grants from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority of nearly a half million dollars. A Verizon spokesman said the total cost of the project was about $13 million, but that number includes work done to the building itself, including replacing transformers, switchgear modernization from analog to PLC-based controls and parking lot upgrades. He said $10 million was the base cost for the power installation.

Verizon has been studying various smaller versions of fuel cells as backup power installations in other applications for about five or six years.

“We have several trials that have been going on, and we're expanding those trials this year,” Metz said. “If those continue to do well in real-world applications, that's a much earlier real-time expansion of our use of fuel cells.”

One such application is the remote terminal site at the Albany, N.Y., airport, where Verizon has installed Plug Power fuel cells there as backup instead of more traditional forms, such as batteries for cases in which the commercial grid fails. Metz said maintenance isn't a factor for this project because it's near Plug Power headquarters. But the company is studying installing fuel cells in more far-flung locations, where technicians with fuel cell expertise will be farther away.

“If we're putting [a fuel cell] atop a mountain in the Sierras or in the desert in Palm Springs, where can we get maintenance; where can we get a repair there?” Metz asked. “That's the infrastructure that needs to be developed for these alternate energy technologies to get widely adopted.”

Fuel cells could be the CO power solution of the future, but the future's not here yet, Metz said. Verizon will be taking a few years to study the reliability, maintenance and costs of the project to determine whether the solution is reproducible for other facilities. Fuel cell manufacturers must lower their costs, too, to put the technology within greater reach to more companies inside the telecom industry and out.

“When a telecom company is adopting a technology, others in other industries recognize that, given our level of emphasis on reliability, on technical excellence,” Metz said. “That's one of the reasons why we recognize that we can help in this area. It's not as necessary to improve this industry, that we immediately start installing these all over the place, just by the legwork that we've done, the heavy lifting that we're continuing to do, that will pave the way for others to follow.

“The more that are purchased, the lower the manufacturing cost goes, the greater the infrastructure for maintenance and repair, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”