The new hospital at UC Irvine will open Wednesday, and it will be all-electric—the medical center's second of its kind so far and the largest in the country.
Hospitals are where people go through some of the most difficult times of their lives, so they need to feel as comfortable as possible. Hospitals traditionally connect to natural gas lines several times stronger than those connected to homes to ensure that rooms are always warm or cool enough and have enough hot water.
But burning natural gas is one of the main ways buildings cause climate change. The way we build and operate buildings is responsible for more than one third global greenhouse gases.
UCI Health-Irvine will include 144 beds and will be all-electric.
The difference is evident in the hospital's new kitchen.
Yes, project chief manager Jess Langerud said during a recent tour, people in hospitals are allowed to eat fried food. This is an electric fryer. “At the end of the day, you still have to eat crispy fries, right?”
He walked over to an appliance that looked like a stove, but with metal zigzags on top instead of regular burners. “I can still leave burn marks on your steak or burger with an all-electric infrared grill,” Langerud said. “It will look like it came off your grill.”
The kitchen, however, is relatively small. One of the biggest impacts on energy consumption in any new building, especially hospitals, is water heaters. At UCI Health-Irvine, that means a series of 100-gallon water heaters that are 20 feet long.
1. The hospital building is served by four electric water heaters. This is a 144-bed facility, without natural gas or fuel. (Gary Coronado/For The Times) 2. Art decorates the hallways near the nurses' station. (Gary Coronado/For The Times)
“We're seeing a huge electrical load,” said Joe Brotman, director of general services for UCI Health.
The other most intensive energy expenditure in the complex is keeping the rooms warm in winter and cool in summer. To do this, UCI Health uses rows of humming heat pumps mounted on the roof.
“I think the largest array is on this side of the Mississippi,” Brotman said.
In the room below, racks of centrifugal chillers that control the flow of refrigerant make him smile.
“I like the way they sound,” Brotman said. “Sometimes it sounds like a Ferrari, like an electric Ferrari.”
While much of the complex is pollution-free, there is one place where dirty energy is still used: the diesel generators that are used for backup power. This is partly due to the fact that the complex was designed six years ago. Since then, solar panels and batteries have become much more common as a backup power source.
The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Outpatient Care building (left) and the San Joaquin Wetlands and Wildlife Refuge (right), adjacent to UCI Health-Irvine Hospital.
Power outages are bad for everyone, but unacceptable for hospitals. If an emergency facility loses power, people will die.
So, four diesel generators with a capacity of 3 megawatts are installed on the roof of the central utility station of the facility. The underground tanks hold 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and National Fire Protection Association. There are codes that require generators to be tested once a month at 30% power for half an hour, Brotman said.
He acknowledged that the emissions from burning this diesel fuel are real. But “it's not something you want to mess with.”
Typically, a central utility plant for such a large facility would be “very noisy. It's dirty. There are usually hazardous chemicals in there,” said Brotman, who has managed physical plants for many years. “There's no combustion here. No carbon monoxide.”
Tony Dover, energy management and sustainability specialist at UCI Health, said the building project team is currently applying for LEED Platinum certification, the highest level the U.S. Green Building Council awards for sustainable architecture.
Most of the energy and emissions savings in a hospital are achieved through building management. But that's only part of the story. The way a building was built is also an important factor in climate change. Concrete is especially bad for the climate due to the way cement is produced. Dover said low carbon concrete was used throughout the project.
Jess Langerud, the hospital's chief project manager, stands in the tunnel leading from the hospital to the central power plant.
Alexi Miller, a mechanical engineer and director of building innovation at the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that provides technical advice on climate and buildings, said the new UCI hospital is a major milestone and he hopes to see more like it.
There are things that Miller thinks could have been done differently. He's not too concerned about using diesel generators for backup power, but he suggested that a system consisting of solar power and energy storage could be better than what UCI ended up with. Such systems, he said, “refuel themselves.” They will “get their fuel from the Sun, not from a tanker truck.”
One area Miller thinks UCI could do better: water heaters, which, while new, use an old and relatively inefficient technology called resistance heat, instead of the heat pump water heaters now routinely used in commercial projects.
“It’s a little surprising,” he said. “If they decided to use heat pump water heaters, they could run them for about three times longer because it would be three to four times more efficient.”
But overall, “I think we have to applaud what they accomplished in building this building,” Miller said.
Other all-electric hospitals are on the way: 2026UCLA Health plans to open a 119-bed neuropsychiatric hospital that does not use fossil fuels. And in 2029, an all-electric Kaiser Permanente hospital will open in San Jose.
