Worcester Business Journal

8 Worcester Business Journal | November 14, 2022 | wbjournal.com BY KEVIN KOCZWARA WBJ Staff Writer K endrick Field in Worcester is on the other side of the train tracks. e freight lines rumble near the 15 acres parcel of land that's home to a few baseball fields, a basket- ball court, and a football field. A few trees offering shade run between the road and the fields. If you keep driving along Ararat Street, eventually you arrive at the intersection of Interstate 190 or keep going and end up in Holden. Sitting on the benches at the park, there's an ominous feeling. A pair of smokestacks rise out of a few trees between the park and the factory on the Powerhouses and the future of energy Saint-Gobain's $22M cogeneration plant in Worcester is only just the beginning, as businesses seek stability from volatile energy markets other side. On one of them the word NORTON spelled down it, a relic of the previous company started in this space 137 years ago. Behind the fields is the main campus in Worcester for the Paris-based and multinational manu- facturing company Saint-Gobain, which purchased the Norton Co. in 1990. e smokestacks belong to its old power plant, which served electricity to the campus for more than 70 years, but since Sept. 20, a new building and new system has been providing electricity and heat: the powerhouse, a 4.7-mega- watt natural gas powered turbine. On Oct. 9, Saint-Gobain held a ribbon-cutting for the new powerhouse. Worcester city officials joined the com- pany's executives to celebrate the new power system. Suits were worn. e new powerhouse cost $22.3 million, and the cogeneration system will not only pow- er the facilities but also heat them and some of the presses by re-using some of the gas and steam emissions through heat exchange. e new power set-up will produce 50% less greenhouse gasses than the old system. "e powerhouse we had was ineffi- cient," said Patrick Redington, general manager at Saint-Gobain Abrasives. ese types of facilities are expected to become significantly more prevalent as energy costs remain unpredictable and large organizations seek the stability of generating heat and electricity onsite. e size of the market for distributed generation – the umbrella term for all types of systems where energy is gen- erated near the end user – is expected to grow from $84 billion in 2021 to PHOTOS | MATTHEW WRIGHT Saint-Gobain expects the new pow- erhouse, with its secondary boilers pictured here, to generate 50% fewer carbon emissions than the Worcester plant's previous power plant. Cogeneration power plants not only supply energy but also heat that can be used in various ways around a manufacturing plant. This is the system's electrical room.

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