Hospitals are among the most critical facilities for ongoing public health and emergency response. As recent events have shown, power outages don’t discriminate, which puts hospitals and their patients at grave risk. At the same time, hospitals are energy intensive, using 2.5 times more energy than similar size buildings, adding significant expense to a model that is under constant pressure to reduce costs. To meet these needs, hospitals are exploring new energy models and advanced technologies, including microgrids. And there’s never been a better time to do so.
The evolving healthcare infrastructure
Over the last decade, there has been a trend in the healthcare industry to become more effective in delivering its services in order to reduce the cost of care. This effort often focuses on reducing inefficiencies in workflow processes, building systems and infrastructure. Chief among these initiatives is improving energy efficiency.
Hospitals must care for patients 24/7, which creates greater demand for lighting, heat and cooling, hot water and steam for equipment sterilization, and refrigeration for temperature sensitive or perishable medications. This demand means hospitals use more than double the energy compared to commercial buildings of the same size.
Aside from the obvious need for reduced energy consumption, there are several other challenges driving the need for energy transformation in healthcare.
- Budgetary pressures. There is growing demand for healthcare organizations to expand their ambulatory care facilities and add more advanced, energy-intensive diagnostic equipment, which makes the cost of energy a big priority for administrators already tasked with cost management.
- Meeting sustainability goals. In the U.S., healthcare emissions represent 10% of national emissions, with hospitals representing 39% of that total. Reducing their carbon footprint is a growing objective for healthcare facilities. In addition to meeting regulatory requirements, minimizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can also help achieve green building certification and create a “greener” image in the community.
- Ensuring patient safety and services. Continuous, reliable and available power is vital to ensure life-sustaining equipment is operational. Extreme weather and aging infrastructure mean grid stability issues are becoming increasingly common in many regions. Such issues can impact power supply and distribution, leading to poor power quality and reliability, damage to costly power-sensitive equipment and increased patient risk. While most hospitals have emergency backup generation in place, often as diesel-powered generation, this form of generation is under attack for its sustainable, long-term viability.
As these challenges become more prominent, healthcare facilities are tackling the energy problem at the source, embracing distributed energy resources (DERs), renewable generation and microgrids to transform their energy infrastructure.
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