HOSPITAL ENERGY PERFORMANCE : A CASE STUDY OF KHOO TECK

Abstract

This study focuses on evaluating and analysing energy consumption of a Green Mark award hospital, Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (KTPH). Energy performance of KTPH was determined through benchmarking against the other local hospitals in terms of the normalised Energy Use Intensity (EUI), which took into consideration the difference in the total medical area across hospitals. The EUI of KTPH was found to increase from 258.76kW/m 2 to 314.78kW/m 2 after normalization. This illustrated the importance of factoring in uncontrollable parameters in determining the performance of a building through the EUI parameter. Performance of the air-conditioning, lighting, mechanical ventilation, and other systems were also evaluated. Overall energy performance of KTPH was analysed with reference to the design and functions of KTPH. The overall results identified KTPH as the top performer in the existing cohort. It is deduced that if passive and active energy efficient designs have been considered at the design stage, substantial energy could be saved, thus reducing operating expenses. The energy breakdown of the individual department at KTPH revealed that the top two energy-consuming departments are the in-house Kitchen and CSSD. The total medical area, which constitutes 45% of KTPH’s GFA, only consumed 37% of the overall energy consumption. This signals that high-energy consumption in hospitals could be due the presence of the non-medical services necessary to support the core function of hospitals. The omission of the potential savings that could be achieved from the implementation of energy efficient designs at KTPH and assumptions made in analysing the data, constituted to the limitations of this study. However, the conservative approaches used ensured that performance of KTPH was not overestimated. Recommendations on how energy consumption could be further reduced at KTPH and other hospitals are also made.