ENERGY MANAGEMENT MARK HOOPER – EXECUTIVE PROJECT MANAGER, ECHUCA REGIONAL HEALTH
Integrating innovation to drive opportunity
Echuca Hospital in regional Victoria, Australia has been designed to be patient focused and staff friendly and through the use of solid engineering principles and stakeholder engagement should deliver long term sustainability.
In late 2015, Echuca Regional Health (ERH) completed the last stage in a $66 million hospital redevelopment. The final product was designed to challenge conventional wisdom and provide a patient focused solution that would offer a flexible, intuitive and calming environment in which to support health and living well. The new hospital is a positive statement that as a community we can continue to adapt and overcome challenges as they arise. The old hospital was delivering
emergency services out of a building that was 129 years old. The newest ward was built in the 1960s. The hospital had a total of three private en-suites for 80 in-patient beds and redevelopment was well and truly overdue. The hospital engineer had worked at
the site for over 10 years and understood well the challenges of public hospitals. A 10 year services plan had been put in place to lever opportunity when it was time for the inevitable redevelopment. Strategic asset replacement, energy efficiency improvements and bench testing of new technologies were undertaken to inform a site wide design strategy, which became the keystone of the engineering design that was taken from master planning through to schematic design, design development and construction. Post occupancy evaluation is currently underway. Knowing what you don’t want can
be just as powerful as knowing what you do want. Lessons from the past have been used to remove historic inflexibility to future proof the hospital and innovations have been incorporated to drive opportunity that can be leveraged towards future cost efficiencies. A dollar spent on energy is a dollar taken from patient care, so it was only natural to link the hospital energy profile to the abundant solar energy available at Echuca, which has two of the largest solar
IFHE DIGEST 2018 Echuca Hospital.
thermal systems in use at a hospital anywhere in the world.
Energy load shifting It is well known that most hospitals in South Eastern Australia use far more annualised energy heating than cooling. Conversely, the peak load requirements for cooling are much greater than the peak heating loads. ERH has good historical data and alongside the load predictions for the new hospital this data was used to design both heating and cooling plant. One obvious issue that arose was
where to best spend capital to ensure that plant was not oversized, but was capable of meeting the peaks in current and future demand. The hospital invested in a solar thermal system in 2011 that coupled evacuated tubes with a 500 kW single effect absorption chiller and some hot
water storage. This was a demonstration system that allowed the hospital to gather raw data that would be used to inform the redevelopment starting in 2014. The heat from this solar field is currently used for cooling in summer and heating in winter. The heating connections supply energy to the domestic hot water and air conditioning heating hot water systems. One of the underpinning principles
was that the chiller should be available to provide 100 per cent capacity at all times regardless of available solar gain. This is achieved by a steam to hot water heat exchanger from the hospital main steam system. With the redevelopment of the hospital came the opportunity to consolidate four separate chilled water loops into one primary/secondary system. This consolidation provided redundancy where there was previously none, and allowed a mix of absorption and electric chillers of varying capacity to provide flexible chilled water production. In addition, a concentrated tracking solar field was built on top of the new hospital with enough capacity to provide 750 kW of chilled water through a double effect absorption chiller. To aid demand management and
energy optimisation, the hospital required a chilled water storage buffer. Permission was obtained at the design stage from the fire authority to insulate the fire water tanks for chilled water storage. This water was coupled to the chilled water primary loop via a heat exchanger and added another 1200 kW of storage.
Mark Hooper
Mark Hooper B Eng, has been the executive project manager at Echuca Regional Health (ERH) since 2004 and has over 20 years’ experience in engineering and infrastructure management. He has provided guidance and leadership to the board and executive over the past 11 years and has overseen the hospital’s capital redevelopment requirements from master planning through to construction. Mark’s role has involved engagement with the Department of Health and Human Services and external consultants together with the local community, staff and patients at ERH.
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