LOW CARBON ENERGY
Realities of an ‘all-electric’ hospital discussed
Three senior electrical engineering specialists from multinational professional services firm, Arup, discuss the findings of a study on the cost and environmental benefits of replacing gas-fired boilers in hospital buildings with electric-based systems, among the key objectives being to significantly reduce carbon emissions. They conclude that trends in fuel prices and decarbonisation of the electricity grid indicate that in the short term for many countries, ‘the lower carbon solution is an electrical heating system one’, while longer term, the operational fuel cost will close its margin on a gas-fired system.
The healthcare sector - hospitals, health services, and the medical supply chain – of OECD countries plus China and India, constitutes around four per cent of total global carbon emissions.1
As reduced
carbon targets are being implemented to minimise climate change impacts, governments and healthcare organisations have a major role to play in reducing the world’s carbon emissions. Approaches to carbon reduction are multi-faceted, and the ‘lean, clean, green’ approach looks to minimise energy consumption through intelligent building design, including form and orientation (lean), prior to implementing low carbon systems (clean), and offsetting carbonised fuel sources through renewable technologies (green). The discussion here is associated with the ‘clean’ stage of this process, and discusses the opportunities for hospital building services to reduce carbon emissions. For our assessment, a thermal model for a notional 50,000 m2
general
acute hospital was created, and its profiles for system energy consumption were used to undertake a detailed review of heating systems.
The conclusions give a quantified understanding of the realities of the concept of an all-electric hospital and its implications with respect to financial, carbon, and operational considerations. Due to key factors such as air quality, potential ability for zero operational carbon, and long term diminishing kilowatt-hour (kWh) cost between electricity and gas, our study found there is a strong case that all heating solutions will gravitate towards an electrical solution
This article, entitled ‘Clean and green; the all-electric hospital’, first appeared in the IFHE Digest 2021. HEJ acknowledges the help of the authors, the IFHE, and the Editor of the Digest, for allowing its re-publication here.
over the coming years. The challenge to the construction and healthcare industry is to consider this now.
Drivers for electrification
The Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, and now formally endorsed by 190 nations, represents a global commitment to reduce the risks and impacts of climate change by reducing carbon emissions. An increasing number of countries are applying policies to implement carbon neutrality by or before 2050. In 2019, the UK government
implemented legislation committing the UK to a legally binding target of net zero emissions by 2050.2
Also in 2019, the NHS
made commitments to reduce carbon – including a target of 51 per cent reduction of carbon emissions against 2007 levels by 2025, with key initiatives including phasing out coal and oil fuel for primary heating uses.3
The decarbonisation of the electricity grid has recently been accelerated in many countries. In the UK, overall emissions have fallen by 40 per cent since 1990.4
The price/kWh of fuels is hard to predict, but the European Commission’s EU Reference Scenario 2016 Energy, transport and GHG emissions Trends to
2050 gives an indication of anticipated trends, with gas and electricity prices expected to rise by in the order of 70 per cent and 6 per cent respectively, between 2020 and 2050.
The costs of electricity and gas, and the carbon content of electricity, vary from country to country. The balance of cost between fuel sources and carbon content have a significant bearing on the financial supportive case for a move to an all- electric hospital solution.
Clean air, meanwhile, is of significant importance to health, with evidence showing that on high pollution days there are increases in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and hospital admissions for stroke and asthma, and spikes in ambulance call- outs. In addition, scientists believe that perhaps a third of new asthma cases might be avoided by cutting emissions, and other conditions are expected to become more common as temperatures rise.5
The all-electric hospital Upon defining the requirement that all systems within the hospital building are to use electricity as the only fuel source, this drives a discussion around electric heating systems. How this is most
August 2021 Health Estate Journal 33
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