by Shane Henson — November 11, 2011—Hospital facilities managers will be better able to assess their buildings’ energy performance through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) release of an important update to its Energy Star for Healthcare national energy performance scale methodology for hospitals.
Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager, an online energy measurement and tracking tool, will now include the updated hospital methodology, which now includes data inputs for the number of MRI machines and personnel and adjustments to weather normalization to reflect the amount of energy used to cool the building. Additionally, the methodology’s 5 million square foot size cap was removed, allowing larger hospitals to take advantage of the online tool.
Over 85 percent of the acute care hospital market has already benchmarked their energy use with Portfolio Manager, making it the most widely used tool of its kind in the healthcare market. The update to Portfolio Manager reflects new survey data provided by the American Society for Healthcare Engineering and the significant changes in how hospitals use energy in recent years.
According to the EPA, improving the energy efficiency of America’s hospitals by 10 percent would save 7.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, 243 million therms of natural gas each year, and about $740 million annually in energy bills. It would also prevent greenhouse gas emissions equal to that from the annual electricity use of over 712,000 homes.
