Lean and Green Wing Memorial Hospital Launches Comprehensive Energy Audit

“Turn out the lights,” the old song says, “the party’s over.” But at Wing Memorial Hospital, turning off some lights is a step toward a brighter future.

Specifically, it’s one likely result of a top-to-bottom energy audit being conducted by the organization, an effort that will result in changes in how Wing uses energy — and significant financial savings.

“We’re taking an overall audit of what energy we use, where, and how much,” said George Nolan, vice president of Support Services at Wing. “Then, we’re comparing that to other hospitals of our size, other hospitals that provide the same care we do. We’ll benchmark ourselves against other hospitals to see how we’re doing.”

With buildings that range in age from 2 to 60 years — Wing was established in 1950 and completed a major expansion in 2008 — the hospital certainly features a mix of energy-efficient systems in the newer areas and less-efficient facilities in the original structures, and Nolan’s department will soon determine what changes need to be made to ‘green up’ the organization — and what those investments might cost.

“A lot of these things we’re looking at are industry standard for buildings being built today,” he said, referring to heating, cooling, and electrical infrastructure designed to conserve energy. “But our structures were built over the past 60 years, so we need to bring the old stuff up to today’s standards.”

Some of the changes might indeed be as simple as training the workforce to turn off unneeded lights, or installing sensors in some rooms that turn them off automatically. Meanwhile, other changes might carry a heftier price tag — say, installing a small co-generation plant that generates both electricity and usable heat, or changing out the hospital’s old, wasteful cast-iron boilers and storage tanks.

But the audit comes first, and Nolan is excited about what it might uncover.

Time to Change

Hospitals are primed for a revolution in energy efficiency, argues an article at environmentalleader.com, a business-news site focusing on environmental and energy issues.

It notes that, as a sector, hospitals and health care facilities account for a disproportionate amount of energy use and emissions — specifically, about two and a half times the energy of a similar-sized commercial building, because they are open 24 hours a day and have extra requirements for air filtration and circulation, cooling, and waste management.

Clark Reed, director of the Healthcare Facilities office in the Energy Star division of the Environmental Protection Agency, notes that health-care buildings are the second-most energy-intensive type of commercial building, just behind food-service operations.

To reduce energy usage and costs, the EPA has established a five-stage approach, best performed chronologically to maximize energy savings, for all commercial buildings, including hospitals. The five steps are: retrocommissioning (ensuring that existing equipment is optimized for maximum efficiency), lighting evaluation, supplemental load reductions, updating the air handling system, and right-sizing the building’s chiller.

The energy audit, which was set to wind up by the end of July, took many of these issues into consideration. “We’re looking at all the different ways we use energy in the building, whether it’s oil or gas, or natural gas in the boilers, or electricity for lights, cooling, whatever we’re doing,” Nolan said.

The Energy Star program rates buildings on their energy efficiency and assigns scores; a facility needs to rate 75 or higher to meet the Energy Star standard. The average for a building in the U.S. is around 50; Wing currently rates at 54. “Our goal is to get it up to 75 so we can become an Energy Star-rated building,” Nolan said.

“It’ll take a lot of work to get there,” he continued. “After the audit, we’ll start to figure out where we can begin to cut back on energy usage. It may be as simple as putting in motion sensors in conference rooms so that, when everyone walks out and they forget to turn the lights off, after a few minutes, they’ll go off on their own.”

Of course, in a meeting, there’s always the chance that everyone will be still enough to trigger the shutoff, Nolan said with a laugh, adding that, “these days, there are a lot more sophisticated motion and infrared sensors that sense body heat.”

Other issues include general lighting, particularly replacing bulbs with the most efficient ones available; and the HVAC system — specifically, determining whether it can run less often or more efficiently, and then tuning equipment up if necessary.

“Then you move up the line to more expensive and difficult things, like changing out old motors and replacing them with more efficient motors with variable-speed drives that run at different speeds depending on the load,” he said.

“We’ll start by identifying the low-hanging fruit,” Nolan continued. “We’ll go department-by-department and evaluate how they use their equipment, and see if there are ways we can turn things off or use them more efficiently.”

Off Switch

In one initiative already underway, the hospital has implemented an automatic shutdown of all non-essential and unutilized computers, an effort that is saving the hospital, by one early estimation, more than $400 per month in utility costs. This initiative has been recognized by Mass Save, the statewide energy-efficiency program.

“The initiative started because, like most hospitals, we have razor-thin margins,” said Ken Riley, director of Information Systems at Wing. And one expense, he explained, was the power consumed by PCs — electrical costs not only to power them, but also to keep the equipment cool.

“We were having heat issues in the data center. We had PCs generating heat through the night for no reason,” he explained.

“Five months into this initiative, it’s hard for us to know exatly how much power is being saved. It’s going to be a year-long assessment to see what kind of financial dent this is making,” Riley added. “But there obviously has to be some sort of savings.

He noted that there’s an educational component involved in the process. “Ten years ago, the thought was that it cost more power to shut down and turn it back on, as opposed to letting it run all night. But it doesn’t behoove someone to leave the machine on all night; it’s actually OK to turn it off and on again.”

Nolan conceded that many changes will have a far greater price tag attached to them than simply training employees to hit the off switch, but when it comes to energy efficiency, most expenses tend to pay for themselves over time. Still, “the payback has to be within seven to 10 years for us to bite off something expensive. Some things have a payback of one and a half to three years, and those are very attractive.”

Reed noted that hospitals that undergo audits to ensure that systems are maximized for utility and efficiency, and make the necessary changes, typically see a 12{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} to 15{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} energy savings over an 18-month period. Whenever possible, the EPA urges hospitals to use Energy Star-qualified products, which use, on average 20{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} less electricity than traditional products.

Overall, Nolan said, employees have been open to change and understand the importance of energy efficiency in the hospital setting. Western Mass. tends to be more aware of green concerns than many regions of the country, and the recent BP oil spill helps keep the energy issue at the front of people’s minds.

“More and more people are very much aware of these things,” he noted, “and while I hate to say it, the tragedy in the Gulf, seeing all the oil being pumped into the water, that heightens people’s awareness about trying to conserve.”

Nolan and his staff have long been aware, and with Wing’s energy audit wrapping up, it’s time to set the findings into motion. “From here we’ll develop our one-, three-, and five-year plans, and start putting some of these things into place.”

In other words, to implement some bright ideas.