CARBON & ENERGY REDUCTION
Digital innovation helping to fight NHS energy cost crisis
David Pownall, Vice-President of Services at Schneider Electric UK & Ireland, explains how digitisation of power management, and deployment of ‘intelligent’ building management systems in healthcare facilities, can bring considerable benefits for healthcare Estates and Facilities managers – not only supporting their drive towards Net Zero, and cutting cost and emissions, but also helping them get the optimal performance, efficiency, and reliability, from their equipment.
The energy crisis continues to put businesses and public sector organisations under huge economic pressure. Healthcare is one of the most energy-intensive sectors, with NHS Trusts and healthcare facilities already consuming vast amounts of energy, and the World Health Organization forecasting that energy costs will rise over the next five years. Late last year, Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust reported that it was expecting a 130% rise in its energy bill for 2022-23, compared with 2021-22, while Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust said it was preparing for a 214% increase in electricity and gas costs for the same period. Alongside these soaring costs, the UK is also living in the shadow of blackouts and outages due to energy scarcity and extreme weather. In 2019 lightning strikes caused outages at Ipswich Hospital, where battery failure caused the back-up generator to fail. The energy risks facing the NHS are myriad. Running alongside is the overarching imperative to ensure that the service reaches its Net Zero goals; for direct emissions, it aims to reach Net Zero by 2040, with an ambition to reach an 80% reduction by 2028 to 2032. Combined, this means that NHS Estates & Facilities managers must embrace more efficient, resilient, and sustainable energy management approaches without compromising patient care.
Always-on resiliency With the need for an always-on, resilient energy supply, alongside increasing amounts of power-hungry medical equipment, NHS hospital Trusts have complex and specific utility requirements. Answering the needs of a digitalised healthcare service requires digitalised power management, energy efficiency, maintenance, HVAC, and building management approaches. For example, today’s intelligent Building Management Systems (BMS) enable healthcare Estates managers to analyse asset and power health in real time, enabling them to
Moving forward, Building Management Systems are being integrated with greater analytics capabilities and remote accessibility.
diagnose and prevent problems before they occur using predictive maintenance capabilities. As the brain of the building, a BMS can monitor and control almost every aspect of its energy performance. For example, a hospital’s heating,
ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system can account for 30% or more of the total energy consumed. As energy costs skyrocket, improving the efficiency of HVAC, lighting, and other systems, can significantly reduce energy consumption and costs. This can include automation of energy-draining factors such as lighting, where occupancy sensors turn off lighting for unoccupied rooms. Installing variable speed drives on chillers and fans reduces energy consumption by enabling ventilation to respond to the requirements of each space based on occupancy and air quality (CO2
) sensor data, for example.
Optimising BMS and HVAC systems can help immediately reduce energy consumption. A building that currently consumes 300 kWh/m2
to reduce consumption to as little as 180 kWh/m2
/year using automation
and control, while reducing associated emissions to help the journey to Net Zero.
/year can expect
New-builds and retrofits Hospitals already have many of these components in place. This makes it relatively simple and cost-effective to retrofit systems that combine them all underneath a single umbrella, and enable them to analyse asset and power health across their estate. Once they have this centralised visibility of the whole network, they gain a variety of benefits. For example, software analytics takes data from BMS and power distribution systems to notify Estates and Facilities managers of common issues such as leaky valves, failing circuit breakers or – as with the Ipswich hospital example above – flat batteries. This enables maintenance teams to address issues before they become a problem. Digitisation can also significantly lower continuing energy expenditures,
August 2023 Health Estate Journal 55
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