Healthcare Energy Efficiency Research and Development

Hospitals are known to be among the most energy intensive commercial buildings in California. Estimates of energy end-uses (e.g. for heating, cooling, lighting, etc.) in hospitals are uncertain for lack of information about hospital-specific mechanical system operations and process loads. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed and demonstrated a benchmarking system designed specifically for hospitals. Version 1.0 featured metrics to assess energy performance for the broad variety of ventilation and thermal systems that are present in California hospitals. It required moderate to extensive sub-metering or supplemental monitoring. In this new project, we developed a companion handbook with detailed equations that can be used toconvert data from energy and other sensors that may be added to or already part of hospital heating, ventilation and cooling systems into metrics described in the benchmarking document.This report additionally includes a case study and guidance on including metering into designs for new hospitals, renovations and retrofits. Despite widespread concern that this end-use is large and growing, there is limited reliable information about energy use by distributed medical equipment and other miscellaneouselectrical loads in hospitals. This report proposes a framework for quantifying aggregate energy use of medical equipment and miscellaneous loads. Novel approaches are suggested and tried in an attempt to obtain data to support this framework