ENERGY GENERATION
Tomorrow’s hospitals – hubs of local heat networks?
With healthcare buildings contributing some 15% of the NHS’s total carbon emissions, changing the way hospital estates and facilities use heating and hot water is ‘an essential step’ in the journey to reach Net Zero. So says Lucy Symons-Jones, director of Net Zero at Lexica, who says that ‘thinking ahead to 2040, a Net Zero hospital could be a hub of the heat network, solving the energy challenge within its footprint, and serving its local community’. She argues that while planning ahead for local generation, transmission, and distribution ‘isn’t yet the modus operandi, it’s certainly the obvious trajectory’.
A recent discussion about decarbonising heating, led by elemental UK (an online media outlet which says it ‘offers news, views, and solutions on reaching net zero to its audience of built environment professionals’), revealed that while there are quick wins to be found, achieving them will require initial changes to both the scope of the work and the workforce undertaking delivery. This also needs deliverable commercial and financial solutions to underpin a change of this significance. The UK runs mostly on gas, with up
to 74% of UK homes heated by gas and fossil fuels. Hospitals in the UK operate with a range of legacy heating systems, some of which are more than 40 years’ old. Unsurprisingly, most are running inefficiently. On average, NHS organisations consumed 75% of their energy from fossil fuels, according to a 2021 BMA survey of NHS organisations, ‘More support needed to help the NHS reach net zero’. As of 2019, coal was still being burned at two hospital sites in the UK.
Volatility ‘here to stay’ While gas prices may drop in the short term, volatility is here to stay. Over the past year, some NHS organisations have seen their energy costs increase threefold. So, there is a real need, across both the public and private sectors, for educative and informative advisory services to help guide senior management teams through the development, procurement, and deployment, of ‘clean’ technologies. Through administering three clean technology frameworks and supporting clients to develop heat decarbonisation plans for their healthcare estates, Lexica has become acutely aware that decarbonising heating in hospitals is the linchpin to achieving Net Zero. Hospitals are well-suited to host heat
networks – providing a cost-efficient and low carbon heating solution for the communities in which they are located.
Lexica says that with healthcare buildings contributing some 15% of the NHS’s total carbon emissions, changing the way hospital estates and facilities use heating and hot water is ‘an essential step’ in the Net Zero journey.
Their 24/7, multi-season demand makes them an ideal anchor load for the network, and the scale of heat offtake offers procurement economies of scale, as well as the potential to be the proving ground for scaling and growing clean technology. Speaking during an elemental UK webinar, Ken Hunnisett, head of Public Sector at Triple Point Investment Management, emphasised the need for decarbonisation driven by legislation, and the complexity of NHS buildings. He mentioned the potential of utilising waste heat from various sources, such as waste facilities, data centres, and industrial processes, as well as waste heat from the sewer system. He said: “Heat networks are generally developed to be technology-agnostic, which is to say you can have myriad sources feeding into them.” A white paper published by Danish engineering business, Danfoss, The world’s largest untapped energy source. Excess heat, on the potential of waste heat from excess sources in the EU, stated that ‘using gas or electricity for heating is like using a chainsaw to cut butter’, as
heating can easily be covered by low-value heating sources such as excess heat. Ken Hunnisett added: “We have a volume of waste heat that more than matches our demand for heat and hot water across the EU. While hospitals have an almost unique requirement for resilience, and will always have back-up heat and power demands, the notion that we should try to use some of that waste heat that occurs in our biggest towns and cities is great. This isn’t a pipe dream; this is the stuff of today.”
A hub of the heat network Thinking ahead to 2040, a Net Zero hospital could be a hub of the heat network, solving the energy challenge within its footprint, and serving its local community. It can even become a hub for charging electric cars and providing energy to nearby neighbourhoods. Through collaboration between healthcare estates and their neighbours, hospitals can go Net Zero all together, and in step with their communities; flipping the difficult problems of decarbonising a carbon-
March 2024 Health Estate Journal 49
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