UC Irvine’s new hospital opens Wednesday and will be all-electric. It is the second and largest such medical center in the country so far.
People spend the most difficult time of their lives in hospitals, so they need to be as comfortable as possible. Hospitals are traditionally connected to natural gas lines that are several times larger than those connected to homes, ensuring that rooms are always warm or cool enough and have sufficient hot water.
But burning that natural gas is one of the main ways. The way we construct and operate our buildings contributes to global greenhouse gases.
UCI Health-Irvine will have 144 beds and will be fully electric.
The difference is evident in the hospital’s new kitchen.
Yes, lead project manager Jess Langerud said on a recent tour that fried foods are allowed inside the hospital. . “After all, you have to eat crispy fries, right?”
He moved on to an appliance that resembled a stove, but with a zigzag of metal across the top instead of a regular burner. “With a fully electric infrared grill, you can sear your steaks and burgers,” Langerud says. “It’s going to look like it came off an open flame grill.”
However, the kitchen is relatively small. One of the biggest contributors to energy use in new buildings, especially hospitals, is the water heater. At UCI Health Irvine, that means rows of 100-gallon water heaters that are 20 feet long.
“This is a huge electrical load that we’re looking at here,” said Joe Brossman, director of integrated services for UCI Health.
Another high energy user in a complex is keeping rooms warm in the winter and cool in the summer. To that end, UCI Health employs banks of noisy heat pumps installed on rooftops.
“I think it’s the largest on this side of the Mississippi River,” Brossman said.
A rack of centrifugal chillers controlling the refrigerant indoors one floor below makes him smile.
“I love their sound,” Brossman said. “Sometimes it sounds like a Ferrari, like an electric Ferrari.”
While most of the complex is uncontaminated, there is one area where contaminated energy is still being used. It is a diesel generator used as a backup power source. Part of that is due to the fact that plans for the complex were drawn up six years ago. Since then, solar panels and batteries have become much more common as backup power sources.
Power outages are bad for everyone, but hospitals can’t tolerate them. People die when emergency facilities lose power.
Therefore, four 3-megawatt diesel generators are installed on the roof of the facility’s central utility plant. An underground tank holds 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel to feed them. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Fire Protection Association have regulations that require generators to be tested at 30% power for 30 minutes once a month, Brossman said.
Emissions from diesel combustion are real, he acknowledged. But “that’s not something you want to mess with.”
Typically, the central utility plants at such large facilities are “very noisy. They’re dirty. They usually have dangerous chemicals,” said Mr. Brossman, who has managed physical plants for years. “There’s no combustion here. There’s no carbon monoxide.”
Tony Dover, director of energy management and sustainability at UCI Health, said the building project team is currently applying for LEED Platinum certification, the highest level awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council for environmentally sustainable construction.
Most of the energy and pollution savings in hospitals come from the way the buildings are operated. But that’s only part of the story. The way buildings are constructed is also an important factor in considering climate change. Concrete is particularly harmful to the climate because of the way cement is made. Dover said low-carbon concrete was used throughout the project.
Alexi Miller, a mechanical engineer and director of architectural innovation at the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that provides technical advice on climate and architecture, said the new UCI hospital is a breakthrough and hopes to see more like it.
Miller thinks it could have been done differently. He wasn’t too worried about using diesel generators as a backup power source, but suggested that a combination of solar power and energy storage might have been better than what UCI ultimately went with. Such systems “refuel themselves,” he says. They will “get their fuel from the sun instead of tanker trucks.”
This is one area where Miller thinks the UCI could have done better. Although new, the water heaters utilize an older and relatively inefficient technology called “resistance heat,” rather than the heat pump water heaters now routinely used in commercial projects.
“That’s a little surprising,” he said. “If we had chosen a heat pump water heater, it would have been three to four times more efficient and would have provided power for approximately three times as long.”
But overall, “I think they should be commended for what they’ve accomplished with the construction of this building,” Miller said.
Other all-electric hospitals are also planned. , UCLA Health plans to open a 119-bed neuropsychiatric hospital that does not use fossil fuels. An all-electric Kaiser Permanente hospital is scheduled to open in San Jose in 2029.
