Building energy

Day to day activities within the Trust’s buildings account for around 24% 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efficient, and have meant we use much less 'grid' electricity than other trusts, they are looking increasingly outdated as electricity supplied by the national grid is increasingly produced by sustainable sources.

This 'greening' of the grid has helped reduce our CO2 emissions by 11% between 2014/15 and 2020/21, but we are facing a big decision about when we need to move away from combined heat and power.

Heat pump engineering equipment

 

What we've done

  • Employed an energy manager who will use detailed meter data from across the Trust to help manage our energy usage better.
  • Replacing out old and failing lighting systems with LEDs.
  • Implemented PC Shutdown software to turn off non-essential hardware.
  • Purchase REGOs for all electricity

What we're doing

  • Exploring how we replace our Combined Heat and Power plants with heat pumps or similar sustainable technology.
  • Ensuring all our lighting is upgraded to LED.
  • Improving the insulation and building fabric of our hospitals so our buildings don't leak heat in winter, and need less cooling in summer.
  • 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.