Airport Executive Park | Electrical System Capital Planning

To identify and prioritize upgrades for your facility, you need to assess mechanical and electrical building systems, evaluate the current condition of the equipment, and provide long-term strategies for renewal. Often, you may also need to account for future growth plans.

Airport Executive Park has been partnering with Prism to undertake significant electrical upgrades since 2008 to support their capital planning strategy and execution.

About Airport Executive Park

Located in Richmond, British Columbia, Airport Executive Park (AEP) is a premier business park with 13 office buildings encompassing 65,000 m2 (700,000 square feet).

This “office campus” accommodates tenants who lease from 500 square feet to over 100,000 square feet of space. The site also includes on-site restaurant, daycare, and conference facilities.

Challenge

Reports received from the business park’s maintenance contractors indicated that much of the electrical distribution equipment was at or nearing its rated end-of-life. The AEP property manager brought Prism in to assess the main electrical building systems, identify the current condition of the electrical equipment, and provide a long-term strategy to renew the electrical systems of nine of its main buildings.

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Solution

Prism completed a thorough needs analysis with the client and started conducting detailed reviews of nine main buildings at AEP. The resulting report summarizes the electrical distribution equipment, describes the current state of equipment condition, estimated the life expectancy of equipment before end of life, and provides a capital plan to maintain and replace the building electrical distribution equipment.

Detailed engineering designs for the most critical updates began shortly after.

The design team was challenged by the room sizes for equipment due to changes in code requirements, increased capacity requirements and distribution and panel equipment dimensions that made equipment placement difficult. The electrical rooms needed to accommodate this change; however, with Prism’s extensive experience working with existing buildings, the electrical design team was able to anticipate these challenges and address them in the planning phase.

The Prism team collaborated with BC Hydro and equipment suppliers to ensure the new equipment would meet the facility’s current and future needs. A backup power system put in place for the implementation phase minimized interruption to building tenants.

Results

By 2020, the main electrical equipment upgrades have been completed for 7 AEP buildings with two additional buildings scheduled to have their electrical equipment upgraded in 2021. The electrical upgrades take into consideration future planning for AEP. The site is well-positioned to accommodate the addition of electric car charging stations and other electrical distribution needs of current and future tenants.