Goldman Copeland has won New Jersey Alliance for Action’s 2024 Distinguished Engineering Award for its work for Ocean University Medical Center, part of Hackensack Meridian Health. The medical center is a 318-bed nonprofit teaching hospital, located in Brick Township, NJ, and affiliated with Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of Rutgers University.
New Jersey Alliance for Action presented the award at a special breakfast event on July 24. Jonah Allaben (shown here), a Principal at Goldman Copeland, accepted the award. Jonah specializes in turning the results of energy audits into actionable designs for increased energy efficiency, and he played a central role in the firm’s award-winning work on the Cooling Plant Centralization and Combined Heat and Power Plant for Ocean University Medical Center.
For that project, Goldman Copeland was retained, through New Jersey Natural Gas’s SAVEGREEN engineered solutions program, to design and implement a new energy reconfiguration. Two major projects were combined with a number of minor optimization improvements to overhaul the complex’s energy consumption patterns. The first major component was the installation of a new combined heat and power plant. This plant produces electricity on-site and re-uses waste heat from the plant to generate domestic hot water and supplement heating hot water. The second major component was an integration of the three separate chiller plants that were serving the three separate wings of the hospital. New chillers were installed in one wing, and piping distribution was re-configured to enable the new plant to serve all three wings.
Goldman Copeland worked with HMH and the Barham Group (who served as the contractor on the project) to develop an innovative design that enabled the campus to re-distribute chilled and condenser water throughout the campus using existing piping, greatly decreasing project cost while enabling full centralization and optimization of energy savings. Resulting energy savings underscore the medical center’s commitment to the environment. They also produce financial savings – at the outset and over time – to offset the new equipment’s cost. In addition, through its energy-efficiency program, New Jersey Natural Gas provides funding for both the design work and the implementation of the new system. That makes the initiative financially appealing to the medical center through its upfront support and long-term savings.
This initiative is transformative in its enhanced performance, efficiencies, and savings. It is innovative in its use of a co-generation plant to enhance the energy efficiency of the medical center. It is unique, as the first completed initiative of New Jersey Natural Gas’s SAVEGREEN engineered solutions program, in providing a model for collaboration between this utility and a major medical center in generating energy and financial savings to ensure a more highly performing healthcare facility for residents of the region.
If you would like to speak with an energy expert at Goldman Copeland, contact Sarah Ingber at singber@goldmancopeland.com.
