Catalyze August 2022

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CATALYZE MAGAZINE | 15 ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN HEALTHCARE Beth Schenk Executive Director of Environmental Stewardship Providence Our problem with fossil fuels is two-pronged, or at least the solutions are. One is efficiency. We are committed to ringing out as much inefficiency as we can. We have a bigger challenge with natural gas. So natural gas is something most of our hospitals - all but one today - are built around for our heating and cooling. HVAC is dependent on our boilers and natural gas. We're not going to be able to just eliminate those overnight. And also, we're dependent on that kind of reliable fuel for healthcare. We have to have backup systems and redundancy. So natural gas is a challenge, but we still hope we can decrease our natural gas use by 10 to 15% through what we call deep energy retrofits. Those are looking at, through energy audits at each site, what are the areas where we have the most opportunity for improvement and working on those over time. We were fortunate to get approved last year for the first time for a green revolving fund, which is an internal funding mechanism such that dollars are set aside and, put toward these energy efficiency steps. And then we capture through our scorecard how much energy that actually saves and how much money that saves over a seven-year period. And then we reinvest that in future energy efficiency.
ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN HEALTHCARE CONTINUED... Now electricity is another side of the energy coin. And we feel like we have a lot more opportunity there compared to natural gas. We're working on that from all the ways that people are with some other more creative ways. LED lighting. We've got to do that. We're behind the ball if we're not taking care of that. Our building envelopes, of course, with our new construction, increased pump and fan efficiency, just the basic nuts, and bolts of energy efficiency work setbacks so that we can automaticallyturn off parts of our buildings when they're not in use. Otherwise, they just run very high energy use 24/7. Let me give you another example of some really good work, some of which has been around for 30 years on some of our sites: groundwater cooling. There's one hospital that has had groundwater cooling since 1992. It pumps water out of the ground from a very cool aquifer (48 degrees) and uses that to run through our chiller and chills the whole building all summer long. It saves all that electricity and is injected back into the aquifer with no pollution added. It's a closed loop system. We're installing more of those now because they have been so successful. It decreases our need for electricity through a renewable source. But the other thing that's really important for electricity is identifying renewable electricity. Like I said, for natural gas, we don't have as many options, but for electricity, we certainly do. And we're doing that too from - onsite to our green tariffs - with our utilities to power purchase agreements and virtual power purchase agreements. And with that, we intend to get to 100% renewable electricity by 2030. CATALYZE MAGAZINE | 16
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Catalyze August 2022

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