Reading airport industrial park gets $1M loan to improve electrical power

The electrical power infrastructure that would power the proposed Reading Airport industrial park landed a $1 million state loan to help expand its capacity.

The Berks County Industrial Development Authority, which is planning the 760,200 square-foot business park on 155 acres it bought from the airport in 2012, was awarded the low-interest loan from the Commonwealth Financing Authority’s Business in Our Sites program, said state Sen. Judy Schwank (R-11).

The proposed business park on the Route 183 corridor is considered a strategic location but lacks sufficient electricity to power the kind of manufacturers and refrigerated warehouses that development officials want to attract.

The loan will be used to extend power lines and install related infrastructure to expand electrical power capacity and availability at the airport, Schwank said.

“The Reading Airport holds tremendous potential for development, and the BCIDA and the local officials have been working diligently to ensure that the infrastructure is in place to entice new businesses to locate there,” Schwank said in a statement.

Even with the improvement, the business park would still need more than the three megawatts of power available to it from the main power grid.

The BCIDA and a consortium of development and local industrial companies, including EnerSys of Bern Township and Ecoult, a subsidiary of East Penn Manufacturing of Lyon Station, are considering building a microgrid to power the business park.

Microgrids are small, independent power networks increasingly used by industrial parks, colleges and communities to supplement or replace energy supplied by the main grid.

The consortium has raised $55,000 so far to cover the estimated $100,000 cost of a feasibility study of a microgrid for the business park, Thomas McKeon, executive director of the BCIDA, said this morning.

McKeon said the loan is the first phase toward getting sufficient electrical power.

“It’s a kind of short-term solution,” he said. “We’re going to need to have that in place to get us started, and then we would like to have more power. The microgrid may be the way to do that.”

Source: LVB