Commercial Buildings: Hospitals (In-patient Health Care)
In-patient health care buildings include those that are used for diagnosis and treatment requiring overnight care, such as hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and rehabilitation centers. Outpatient health care buildings include those that involve diagnosis and treatment in which services are not required overnight, such as dental clinics, emergency walk-in clinics, or veterinary clinics. In the US, there are about 22,000 in-patient health care buildings, and 16,400 of these are hospitals. The average hospital is about 74,600 square feet and all in-patient health care buildings account for 1.6 billion square feet, which is about 3 percent of all commercial floor space in the U.S.
Health care buildings (both outpatient and in-patient) account for 11 percent of all commercial energy consumption, using a total of 561 trillion Btu of combined site electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and district steam or hot water. They are the fourth highest consumer of total energy of all the building types. The relative consumption of these different energy sources are:
- Electricity: 38%
- Natural Gas: 46%
- District Heat: 13%
- Fuel Oil: 21%
The average end use of these energy sources in U.S. hospitals can be classified as follows:
The cost intensity for typical hospitals in California is in the range
$3-4/square foot-year, twice as high as that for office buildings.
Electric to total thermal demand and electric to domestic hot water demand
for health care buildings in the U.S. are 0.9 and 1.69, respectively. Therefore,
hospitals are perfectly suited for CHP technologies, even in the case where
space heating needs are not met by CHP. Typical average electricity
demands for hospitals are in the range 100 kW-5 MW.
The estimated DG-CHP technical potential for all the in-patient health care applications in the US is about 8,400 MW and the market potential is about 7,000 MW. In California, this technical potential is as high as 690 MW.