RESILIENCE AND PREPAREDNESS
200 schools across England. The National Grid’s Great Grid Upgrade, which aims to completely transform the grid to better deal with more renewable power from offshore wind and other sources, is also underway. Energy intermittency aside, this introduces the possibility of more blackouts due to tinkering and maintenance work. All of these changes will require hospitals to become smarter, more connected, and more prepared. That begins with foundational systems being made future- ready.
Historically, hospital electrical and building management systems (BMS) have been proprietary and fragmented. Multiple vendors, siloed data, and hardware locked to unique platforms, have limited the ability of estate managers to respond to changing requirements. Open protocol systems solve that problem. Instead of locking a facility into a single vendor’s technology, they establish a shared ‘language’ that enables diverse systems to communicate and collaborate. Lighting control, HVAC, access management, back-up systems, and building analytics, can all be managed through a unified interface, regardless of brand or age. In turn, this gives hospitals the power to choose the best technology for each use case, without concern for compatibility or future upgrades. It simplifies retrofitting, and encourages innovation, and – most importantly – it improves clinical resilience while reducing operational and environmental costs.
Royal Preston Hospital For example, Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire has installed ABB Cylon across its sprawling estate, which serves over 1.2 million patients a year. It gradually replaced legacy BMS infrastructure with a unified, open control system. This controls ventilation, boiler plants and heating systems, and lets operators carefully manage lighting and temperature by zone. Occupancy sensors also reduce energy waste in empty rooms. These simple changes have profound cumulative effects on both carbon footprint and cost. Connected Energy and Asset Management (EAM)
platforms allow continuous digital monitoring of transformer systems, UPS performance, and power distribution. By remotely identifying temperature and vibration anomalies as well as electrical faults, these platforms enable predictive maintenance via real-time data available via the cloud.
Helsinki University Hospital A good illustration of this was when Helsinki University Hospital (HUS), one of Europe’s most advanced healthcare institutions, recently adopted ABB’s transformer- sensing and asset monitoring solution to reduce shutdowns and physical inspection requirements. When integration is seamless across systems, hospitals are no longer left vulnerable to bottlenecks or single points of failure. This is the model that must now be scaled across the UK and internationally.
Keeping uninterruptible power healthy The backbone of any hospital’s resilience plan is its emergency power system, but as recent events have shown, not all back-up systems are fit for purpose. UPS systems are supposed to provide a seamless automatic switch in the case of an outage, acting as an instant bridge between an appliance and backup generators or batteries, but they must also be reliable themselves. Highly modular and energy-efficient UPS systems, such
as the MegaFlex DPA, are built on independent modules with redundant components. They ensure continuous operation even if individual units inside the wider system require maintenance or suffer faults. In Estonia, ABB recently supported Haapsalu and Narva hospitals in implementing new DPA UPS infrastructure, delivering
With an average energy intensity of approximately 74 kWh per square foot, hospitals consume up to 2.5 or 3 times more energy per square metre than commercial buildings.
September 2025 Health Estate Journal 83
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