CARBON AND ENERGY REDUCTION
energy is not a viable option, the first wave of a five-year hydrogen collaboration will start with a workshop of Trusts that have the opportunity to work together. Having the top energy users on the road to Net Zero should meet the NHS 2032 targets. In 2024 the masterplan will widen to include planning for the next 1600 NHS buildings using significant energy, benefiting collective knowledge share and delivery principals from the model programme. NHS Trusts that do not wish to wait
until contacted to participate in the NHS collaboration are welcome to contact NHPower at
EOI@NHpower.net.
Part 3 Figure 3: Urban geothermal drilling in Paris (2021). (See Part 4.)
deployed or in deployment across the NHS, huge carbon reductions are being delivered, and in many cases, financial savings too.
Technologies currently ‘too risky’ Unfortunately, this route alone will not get the NHS to Net Zero in time to meet its obligations, because most of the current Net Zero technologies are too risky for the established performance contractors to guarantee. In addition, the providers of the new technologies are themselves small, and in no position to take significant risk on their own technologies. In fact, current installations indicate that the task of developing and proving the technology alone is normally all the risk they can manage. The NHS can learn from other industries
that manage the equivalent risk, on a larger scale. Outside the NHS, large risks are managed by insurance, risk sharing, and diversity of risks. The pension industry, insurance, and energy industries, all use these techniques, which – coupled with good engineering design for resilience – offers the NHS a way forward that bypasses the funding issue, and would allow many Trusts to realistically aim for Net Zero.
Benefits of NHPower While the NHS is considering insurance management for certain risks, it has long managed a risk pooling scheme for larger risks. We are in a time of change, and while the NHS risk pool is not yet being offered for Net Zero projects, there is an affiliated NHS collaboration alternative, called project NHPower, which is available to Trusts wishing to share risks and benefits across member Trusts to avoid the need and expense of project or contractor private finance. NHPower members will have the opportunity to work with grant and centralised funding, and introduce security in the source of energy provision, without carrying an asset on balance sheet, and instead pay a p/kWh for energy, that in many cases is decoupled from the volatility of the open energy market. The top 211 NHS sites, using more than 10 m kWh each, are all being categorised as to the available and optimal routes to Net Zero, under the categories listed above. Piloting the way forward, five Trusts have commenced a four-year collaborative procurement for geothermal energy. In quarter two of 2023 the second wave of geothermal collaboration will go to market, and it is hoped that where geothermal
Geothermal energy: a potential source for decarbonising the hospital estate
Dr Corinna Abesser, BGS
Geothermal energy occurs across the UK, mostly in deep onshore sedimentary basins. Where groundwater circulation occurs within deeply buried rocks (1 to 3 km), it forms hydrothermal systems or deep geothermal aquifers, also called ‘hot sedimentary aquifers’. Hydrothermal systems arise from a combination of three geological components: fluid, heat, and permeable rocks. Temperatures within the basins are generally 40 to 60 °C, but could reach 100 °C in the deepest parts of some of the basins1
(Busby, 2014); hence
these systems are most suited to provide direct-use heating (without use of a heat pump) for district heating, horticulture, or industrial process heat. BGS has undertaken detailed mapping
and investigation of this resource since the 1980s, and estimates that the geothermal heat resource contained within these basins is 100-200 times the UK’s domestic heat demand.2
However, as heat cannot
currently be transported over long distances because of high distribution losses along the way, opportunities for developing geothermal heat are limited to areas of high heat demand, such as cities. Many major population centres in the UK lie above or adjacent to sedimentary basins.
May 2023 Health Estate Journal 31
Dalkia
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