It’s a familiar struggle for hospitals: While patient care and comfort are paramount, budgetary realities can jeopardize those priorities by making it difficult to update aging infrastructure. With a 24/7 operational workload and escalating costs, hospitals like Bristol understand the urgency of treating the problem — but don’t always know there’s an efficient solution.
The Story
Bristol Hospital is committed to healthy outcomes for its patients. It had come to realize, however, that maintaining the health of its physical plant was becoming an uphill battle. To reduce operational costs, simplify maintenance, enhance environmental quality, and reduce the facility’s energy and water consumption, a wide-scale retrofit project was needed—at both its main campus and its skilled nursing facility, Ingraham Manor. But could it afford the treatment it needed?
Metrus Energy showed Bristol how it could achieve all of its goals—without incurring any upfront costs.
SESA breathes new life into aging facility
Metrus showed Bristol how an efficiency-as-a-service project would allow the hospital to upgrade its facilities by tapping into the energy and water savings the efficiency retrofit project would realize. Through Metrus’ innovative Sustainable Energy Services Agreement (SESA), Bristol Hospital was able to undertake a multi-measure, multi-site retrofit project that incorporated numerous energy and water efficiency measures and critical equipment upgrades. The overall project benefited from the receipt of an incentive from the hospital’s local utility, Eversource.
The Upshot
The innovative health care SESA includes LED lighting retrofits, building envelope upgrades, an energy management system, power factor correction, steam trap replacements, steam jackets and pipe insulation, water conservation, and air handling unit replacements. The project will save 1.6 million kWh of electricity, 124,298 CCF of natural gas, and 3.7 million gals of water per year, which will reduce the hospital’s energy and water use by more than 20%. The savings translate into approximately 13,344 metric tons of CO2 over the life of the project—the equivalent of taking 2902 cars off the road per year.
“Being able to pay for critical new equipment and facility upgrades from energy and water savings makes good financial sense and keeps us focused on providing outstanding patient care.”
— Ric Braam, Chief Financial Officer, Bristol Hospital
