Construction contract awarded for $75 million laboratory in Richland
A pair of Houston, Texas, businesses have been picked to design and build the Grid Storage Launchpad, a $75 million facility planned at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.
The launchpad, paid for with taxpayer dollars through the Department of Energy, is planned to increase the use of clean energy and make the nation’s power grid more resilient, secure and flexible.
A partnership of Harvey | Harvey-Cleary and Kirksey Architecture has been awarded a $53 million contract for the project.
The team also was hired to design and build the Energy Sciences Center, a $90 million research facility under construction at PNNL’s Richland campus.
As with the Energy Sciences Center, PNNL anticipates that the builder will use Tri-Cities area subcontractors for some of the work and provide some construction jobs to regional workers.
Construction of the Grid Storage Launchpad could begin late this year, with the building ready to use as soon as 2023, depending on Congressional appropriations for the project.
The building will be a minimum of 85,000 square feet with 30 research laboratories, plus testing chambers to assess prototypes and new grid energy storage technologies under realistic grid operating conditions.
A visualization laboratory with audio-visual displays will be used to analyze the role of energy storage in future grid scenarios and develop design criteria for technologies.
“Today, widespread deployment of energy storage for grid applications is inhibited by the need for improved performance and reduced cost, and the ability to validate the reliability and safety of new technologies,” said PNNL Director Steven Ashby.
“Research at the Grid Storage Launchpad will address these challenges, accelerating the development and deployment of new grid storage technologies,” he said.
Tri-Cities economic development officials are hoping that work done at the launchpad will spin off into local manufacturing of new grid materials and systems developed there.