Monitoring and Modelling UK hospital energy consumption to identify optimal building-specific retrofit measures for a changing climate
Louis Fifield, Loughborough University
Overview
The department of health has set stringent energy targets in order to reduce the NHS’s contribution to carbon emissions by 2050. Hospital buildings produce a considerable proportion of the NHS carbon emissions and therefore play a central part in meeting the NHS’ targets. The NHS has recognised their need for research and innovation in this area and has called for a Low Carbon Design taskforce to help them to accomplish their goals.
This project will use information available in the public sphere to assess the NHS hospitals current performance on a national basis, in order to investigate which trusts are consuming the most energy.
This PhD is privileged to be able to work with four Hospitals in different NHS Trusts throughout England, Bradford Royal Infirmary, Cambridge Addenbrookes, St Albans City and Leicester Glenfield. The internal environments of various wards within these hospitals are being monitored as part of the ESPRC funded the DeDeRECC project. Within hospitals, the largest consumer for energy is heating; whose primary driver is the external and internal temperatures. This piece of work will use the monitored air temperature data to draw relationships between energy consumption and thermal comfort criteria.
An important part of this will be to monitor the energy consumed for heating the various buildings. However, it happens to be the case, that there is little knowledge on methods of monitoring the heating consumption of the different aspects of the heating. Therefore this work will involve developing a method to monitor the heating demand in the different types of hospitals.
The monitored data for both energy and air temperatures will be used to calibrate simple building energy models for the different trusts. The final stage of the work will be to use these models to create a national projection of the UK Hospital stock which will be used to investigate the effects of different heating related scenarios on the stocks energy consumption. These scenarios will include the increased temperature due to global warming, heating reduction methods, i.e. increased insulation and changing the internal comfort criteria.
Project Team
Student(s)
Louis Fifield
Supervisor(s)
David Allinson
Kevin Lomas
Outputs
Conference poster
MSc Poster – Leicester’s Urban Heat Island
A poster for the Annual Colliqium, in 2010. Explaining the work done for the MSc project, and the results found.