Microturbines for CHP at California care facilities

Capstone will supply eigth C65 microturbines for combined heat and power applications at California long-term care facilities.

Capstone Turbine Corp. announced several orders for eight C65 microturbines for six long-term care facilities located throughout California. Each facility will include 65 to 130 kW of microturbine power. Cal Microturbine, Capstone’s exclusive distributor in California, secured the orders, which are expected to be commissioned in late 2021.

The eight natural gas-fueled microturbines will be equipped with Capstone’s integrated heat recovery modules (HRM) to improve on-site efficiency. The combined heat and power (CHP) solution allows the customer to capture the thermal energy from the microturbine exhaust and utilize it for domestic hot water and heating. In addition, the microturbines will provide baseload power for all of the facilities and operate in dual mode, which allows the customer to operate independently in case of a grid outage or parallel with the grid in a load sharing capacity.

“We have hundreds of installations globally in hospitals and hotels, but long-term care facilities have been a somewhat limited niche for us, yet certainly one that warrants our attention as they have similar critical power and resiliency needs to healthcare and hospitality and continue to grow,” said Darren Jamison, president and chief executive officer of Capstone. “U.S. Census reports indicate that by 2030, almost one-fifth of the U.S. population will be of retirement age.”

Because uptime was of critical importance for this application, the customer also purchased a Capstone 10-year Factory Protection Plan (FPP) that includes access to Cal Microturbine’s service network with a demonstrated 98% C65 ICHP fleet uptime.

“Cal Microturbine’s extensive investment in service talent and inventory and our exceptional fleet uptimes made Capstone Turbine the technology front runner for these projects and secured 10-year Factory Protection Plans for these projects,” said Kenda Brown, president of Cal Microturbine.