HEALTHCARE ESTATES 2022 KEYNOTES – SUSTAINABILITY


The three speakers (left to right): Salix Finance CEO, Annie Shepperd, Councilor Tracey Rawlins, Executive Member for Environment & Transport at Manchester City Council, and Sue Ion, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, took a range of interesting audience questions following their sustainability-themed presentations.


have heat as outputs as well as electricity,” she explained. The advantage over the renewables here was that the primary heat output could be used to make electrolysis more efficient, and thus cheaper. Efficiency and cost competitiveness-wise, she added, it was comparable to fossil with carbon capture, ‘but without the fossil emissions’. She said: “This may be an advantage that nuclear can give us if we build it going forward.” She continued: “Hydrogen is the other alternative we have – but we have to generate it cleanly, and we don’t do so currently. We make it via steam reformation of methane, which is not low carbon. We will thus, in all probability, have to generate hydrogen by electrolysis to generate clean hydrogen, meaning it must come from nuclear power stations, or from wind and solar.”


While some small trials were taking


place in the North-West and North-East of England, Dame Sue said we ‘would need to do a lot more to understand how we’re going to both produce the hydrogen and then deliver it to our homes and industry’.


Battery storage options One other potential avenue – the speaker said – was to couple renewables with battery storage. “However,” said Dame Sue,


“this is tricky too, because there are still some challenges for batteries. They need to be optimised for better performance – with a longer life, faster charging, and greater safety. We need to make them cheaper, mass-producible, and more sustainable; we don’t currently recycle batteries, and we need them to be 100% recyclable to put the materials back in the supply chain.” Batteries also met a lot of purposes – for instance being used for cars, big vehicles, and stationary storage, coupled with renewables, ‘to give us more stable power’. There remained major sustainability


issues, however, associated with the source of the materials used to create batteries. One of the major sources of lithium is the Atacama Desert in Chile, and Dame Sue explained that sourcing it from there involved ‘draining big tranches of it’, while mining of cobalt was mainly undertaken by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She said: “So these are the big sources of global lithium and cobalt. We thus need to ensure we ask ourselves about sustainability, as well as low carbon, when looking at battery storage.”


Dame Sue Ion praised IHEEM, HEFMA, and the Carbon & Energy Fund’s jointly-produced publication, A Healthcare Engineering Roadmap for Delivering Net Zero Carbon.


56 Health Estate Journal November 2022


Electricity price issue Dame Sue noted also that UK newspapers had suggested the previous week that rapid electric car chargers were now costing as much as petrol to use – mainly because of the price of gas driving up electricity prices. Meanwhile, heat pumps were definitely an option – for use in both homes, and for larger installations such as hospitals


Ian Hinitt, an IHEEM Past-President, who chairs IHEEM’s Environmental Sustainability Technical Platform, set the scene for the three presentations.


and schools. She added, however, for all new technologies, that ‘a lot more needs to happen in terms of standardisation and deployment’, although she knew our national academies were all ‘working very hard to look at the science and engineering challenges that are still there for us’.


Remaining challenges As her presentation drew to a close, Dame Sue said there were many questions still to address. “For example,” she said, “’What else can we use carbon dioxide for?’; ‘How can we produce hydrogen at scale?’; ‘Can we use ammonia as an energy vector?’; ‘How can we make sustainable carbon- based fuels?’; ‘How do we transition to hydrogen?’; ‘How do we take greenhouse gas out of the earth directly when it’s emitted?’, and ‘Can we make biofuels sustainable?’ ”


She closed with the words: “I want to finish my presentation with a real round of applause for you as a sector, and to IHEEM, HEFMA, and the Carbon & Energy Fund, for their jointly produced document, A Healthcare Engineering Roadmap for Delivering Net Zero Carbon, because the Government hasn’t got a roadmap of how we’re going to get to Net Zero at a national level. It’s got lots of individual initiatives – all very laudable – but none of them have a real powerhouse behind them, whereas your ‘Engineering Roadmap’ was fantastic. It was realistic, it looked for low-hanging fruit, it covered everything from demand side to generation side, and it examined the differences between old hospital estates and brand new hospitals, and what goes into them all. I’ve indeed used it as a blueprint in many talks that I’ve given to other industries. So, very well done to you.” This brought Dame Sue Ion’s presentation to an end, and Ian Hinitt then introduced the next of the session’s speakers, Manchester City Council’s Councilor Tracey Rawlins.


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