HSE to target energy cost reductions at high-usage hospitals and care facilities

The HSE is asking the country’s major hospitals and State-run healthcare facilities to look at ways of reducing energy consumption amid the surging cost of electricity and gas.

About 170 hospitals, publicly run nursing homes and long-term care facilities have been identified as accounting for between 75 and 80 per cent of the energy consumed by the HSE.

There are energy teams in place at 111 of these facilities, comprising senior management and operations managers who are looking at ways of reducing energy consumption.

Peter Smyth, the HSE’s national lead for capital and estates, said the teams were meeting to assess what behavioural changes can be introduced to reduce energy consumption and what can be brought forward in longer-term climate action plans to make operations more energy efficient.

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“The focus in each location is asking are we doing everything we can and what else can we do, and is there anything we can do to accelerate work in that area?” he said.

Mr Smyth said constructing energy-efficient new buildings and retrofitting existing buildings were longer-term plans to meet climate action plan targets by 2030 and 2050.

More immediate measures such behavioural change by staff in switching off lights and unused devices, changing to LED lighting, time clocks on boilers and increased insulation could be achieved by the energy teams pushing management and staff “to do things differently,” he said.

“These are relatively no cost and low-cost measures and they are one part of the solution. For the medium and longer term solutions, we are progressing all of those but can they be accelerated? We will establish how some of those deep retrofits can be,” he said.

The health sector accounts for a fifth of electricity consumption by the public sector, according to the HSE, but hospitals are limited in their capacity to reduce temperatures to 19 degrees as planned in other public buildings.

Temperatures typically must remain in the 20 to 24 degree range in hospitals to protect patients, particularly older patients.

“Elderly patients are more sensitive to lower temperatures and there is a clinical need for temperatures to be higher in hospital buildings — that is just a fact,” said Mr Smyth.

At St James’s Hospital in Dublin, the State’s largest teaching hospital, changing energy-use behaviour among staff is seen as the quickest way to reduce costs amid the energy costs crisis.

“We have 4,500 to 5,000 staff. When you have that type of scale, the costs are significant but even minor changes such as switching off computers and lights can bring significant benefits,” said Vincent Callan, director of campus development at St James’s.

“At a time like this, I would not dismiss some of the softer, behavioural changes because other than that, there is going to be a limited range of things that people can actually do to truly address the cost pressure in this area.”

Mr Callan said St James’s could look at reducing costs by turning down temperatures in large public areas such as concourses or corridors but that older hospitals and healthcare facilities would not have the segregation technology to target energy reduction in particular areas.

St James’s has already moved to energy-efficient lighting that has saved the equivalent of the energy that would be used to power 4,000 Irish homes, while energy performance contracts introduced in recent years have helped to lower demand, increase efficiency and lower costs.

A new building management system has resulted in a reduction of 69,000 hours in the running time of air handling units in theatres and hospital rooms, said Mr Callan.