BEM’s Harold Olarte (left), Mark Nardolillo (second from left), and Mittul Patel (right) stand with NJ TRANSIT’s John Geitner (second from right) at the 50th Anniversary Engineering Excellence Awards ceremony, held by the American Council of Engineering Companies of New Jersey on July 14, 2021.
On July 14, 2021, BEM and NJ TRANSIT representatives attended the 50th Anniversary Engineering Excellence Awards ceremony in Jamesburg, NJ to accept the presentation of the 2020 Honor Award for the NJ TRANSITGRID initiative. The annual award ceremony was hosted by the American Council of Engineering Companies of New Jersey (ACECNJ) to recognize and celebrate engineering achievements that demonstrate the highest degree of skill and ingenuity among firms throughout the state of New Jersey.
NJ TRANSITGRID was conceived in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, when over 250,000 customers were left without mass transit for over two weeks due to the lack of power from the public grid. The resulting $546 million NJ TRANSITGRID Microgrid Central Facility project is a first-of-its-kind mass transit “microgrid” is designed to provide decentralized reliable power during times of emergencies to the core segment of NJ TRANSIT’s and Amtrak’s critical service territory on portions of the Northeast Corridor (NEC), the Morris & Essex Line (M&E), and the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail (HBLR). The microgrid will be resilient, making the transportation system substantially less vulnerable to power outages from extreme weather events thereby providing reliable and safe service to its customers. The project is funded by a Federal Transit Administration (FTA) grant awarded through Administration’s Emergency Relief Program.
BEM was instrumental in developing NJ TRANSIT’s application for FTA funding. Once it was secured, BEM was then retained to manage all the environmental aspects of the permitting process and related studies. NJ TRANSIT is now progressing from final design through construction.
To support the Governor’s clean energy initiatives, NJ TRANSIT is encouraging proposers to incorporate renewable and other green technologies that work with existing and known site constraints. The microgrid will be designed and constructed to accommodate carbon-neutral power generation options, such as Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) (made from food waste or other organic materials) and fuel cells (using the chemical energy of hydrogen or another fuel to cleanly and efficiently produce electricity as they become more commercially feasible.
BEM will continue to work with NJ TRANSIT to see the groundbreaking NJ TRANSITGRID project through to its completion.
