Building energy

A building's energy system

Day-to-day activities within the Trust’s buildings account for around 25% of the Trust’s emissions. This includes the fossil fuels burnt to heat our buildings, the electricity we use to power and cool our buildings, and the refrigerant gases that are used within refrigeration systems such as chillers and air conditioning units. 

Over the last decades, we have used 'Combined Heat and Power' units that burn gas to produce electricity and heat. Whilst these are reasonably efficient and have meant we use much less 'grid' electricity than other trusts. This 'greening' of the grid has helped reduce our CO2 emissions by 28% between 2014/15 and 2024/25.

The Trust was awarded a total of £63 million to reduce our building energy carbon footprint. The scheme is expected to be completed this year and is now entering the final stages. At our two main hospital sites, boreholes around 200 metres deep are drilled as part of the Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) Installation. For our smaller satellite sites, such as Parkview, Air Source Heat Pumps and Solar Panels are being installed. This overall project aims to reduce our carbon emissions by over 8,000 tonnes of CO2e. 

What we've done 

  • Replacing out old and failing lighting systems with LEDs.
  • Implemented PC Shutdown software to turn off non-essential hardware.
  • Modernise windows and insulation across Birmingham Women’s Hospital.

What we're doing

  • Replace Combined Heat and Power plant with Ground Source Heat Pumps.
  • Starting to monitor our refrigerant gas usage. (These gases, if released into the atmosphere in small quantities, have the same impact as a large volume of CO2)
  • Upgrading our building monitoring systems.