The Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., the quasi-public city agency that is converting the former military base to private use, envisions the Navy station and its unique electrical infrastructure as a magnet for energy-related business.
According to the plan, the Navy Yard is already becoming an energy campus where businesses, academics and Navy engineers congregate and share knowledge about power systems. They hope that new commercial ventures - spin-offs from the Navy's research into alternative-energy sources or smart-grid technology - will emerge from such a creative environment.
The energy-campus promoters are not thinking small. They liken the Navy facility to a national laboratory that can become a regional hub for related developments. They believe that energy-related research and development might one day do for Philadelphia what computers did for Silicon Valley.
"We think we're involved with something here that could affect the overall economy in a big, big way in the long term," said Joseph J. Houldin, chief executive of the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center, a nonprofit economic-development agency.
"The Navy Yard has the potential to do for the energy sector what University City does for the life sciences," he said.
Development officials have been planning the energy-campus concept for several years, since studies suggested that Philadelphia needed to develop new areas of excellence to compete with "knowledge centers" such as Boston, San Francisco and North Carolina's Research Triangle.
"We began to look at the Navy seriously as our national lab, and that led us quickly to energy as a forward- growth strategy," said RoseAnn B. Rosenthal, chief executive of Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a economic-development agency.
