Energy management in hospitals: Evolution of a methodology

The impact of properly managing energy in hospitals is significant, due to the high bills and polluting emissions, and is complex, due to the wide range of energy consuming equipment to be kept always running. Energy efficiency plans in hospitals, which are pivotal in the European wide effort to redevelop existing buildings, have to be carried out as a part of a wider redesign process and must encompass complex data analysis and modeling. Based on the activity carried out within the European funded project H2020/MSCA/STEER, this work elaborates on the methodology, as tested on a building information model of a health center in Sicily, to identify positive and negative aspects of energy-related technology options to keep hospitals efficient. The main steps of the methodology carried out in the health center were: (1) collect data and input it in a digital model; (2) create and test a simplified quasi-steady state model of the building; (3) create a dynamic simulation model of the building; (4) run dynamic and simplified model simulations of the energy performance of the building; (5) compare results obtained from the two models in various scenarios, showing that the relevant differences after indicative interventions and parameter changes are equivalent.