Worcester Business Journal

FOCUS Green business Hospitals go green to help meet energy demand Heywood seen as having 'ambitious vision'; UMass Memorial aims for $6M in annual savings BY EMILY MICUCCI Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer Now, with the industry standard for green energy, Gundersen has created a blueprint for other hospitals. And while hospitals in Central Massachusetts haven't come close to investing in renewable energy infrastructure on the level Gundersen has, they're beginning to think about how green energy can help drive down costs, as well as the carbon footprint. Hospitals, and the larger systems that often run them, are some of the nation's top consumers of energy. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, health care facilities accounted for about 10 percent of U.S. energy consumption in 2012, and spent more than $8 billion on energy annually. Bill Ravanesi, partner at the interna- tional nonprofit Health Care Without Harm, is working to change that in Massachusetts. Based in the group's Longmeadow office, Ravanesi is a con- sultant to Massachusetts hospitals and health care systems under its Health Care Green Building & Energy Program. As co-director of the Boston Green Ribbon Commission's health care work- ing group, Ravanesi helped major Boston hospitals reduce their energy consumption by 6 percent between 2011 and 2013, and commit to reducing greenhouse emissions by more than 25 percent by 2020 through grant-funded green energy initiatives. "My focus now for the next three to four years is to do the same thing across the state at the smaller hospitals," Ravanesi said. Heywood a leader; UMass Memorial may follow Ravanesi estimated that hospitals use two-and-a-half times more energy per square foot than any other industry, so when it comes to adopting green (or at least clean) energy, the sector offers lots of potential to gain new ground. Ravenesi is hosting a roundtable this month on the benefits of adopting com- bined-heat-and-power (CHP) systems, which are considered alternative energy because they're more efficient than stan- dard systems. The other plus for hospi- tals is that they generate energy on site, so that when the grid goes down, the systems are still able to deliver 80 percent of the power normally generated. >> Continued on Page 16 I t's hard to imagine any hospital, with its massive demand for round-the-clock power, operating off the grid. But it's happening at one Midwest hospital system. In October 2014, Gundersen Health System, based in La Crosse, Wis., announced it had reached its goal of energy independence when, for the first time, it produced more energy than it consumed. The system, which operates a large network of hospitals and medical clinics across 19 counties, achieved this by investing in solar, wind, biomass, and waste-to energy projects as well as several other energy efficiency programs. "We did not set out to be the greenest health system," Dr. Jeff Thompson, Gundersen's CEO, said in a statement when the milestone was announced. "We set out to make the air better for our patients to breathe, control our rising energy costs and help our local economy." 12 Worcester Business Journal • April 13, 2015 www.wbjournal.com

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