A new hospital at UC Irvine opens Wednesday and it will be all-electric — only the second such medical center, and the largest, in the country so far.
People live through some of the toughest moments of their lives in hospitals, so they need to be as comfortable as possible. Hospitals traditionally connect with natural gas lines several times bigger than those connected to residential homes, to ensure that rooms are always warm or cool enough and have sufficient hot water.
But burning that natural gas is one of the main ways that buildings cause climate change. The way we build and operate buildings is responsible more than one-third of global greenhouse gases.
UCI Health–Irvine will include 144 beds, and will be entirely electric.
The difference is manifest in the hospital’s new kitchen.
Yes, said principal project manager Jess Langerud on a recent tour, people are permitted to eat fried food in a hospital. Here, the fryer is electric. “After all, you still have to have your crunchy fries, right?”
He moved over to an appliance that looked like a stove but with metal zigzagging across the top instead of the usual burners. “I can still put your sear marks on your steak or burger with an infrared grill that’s fully electric,” said Langerud. “It’ll look like it came off your flame-broiled grill.”
The kitchen, though, is relatively minor. One of the real heavy hitters when it comes to energy use in any new building, and especially in hospitals, are the water heaters. At UCI Health–Irvine, that means a row of 100-gallon water heaters 20 feet long.
“This is an immense electrical load we’re looking at right here,” said Joe Brothman, director of general services at UCI Health.
The other heaviest use of energy in the complex is keeping rooms warm in winter and cool in summer. For that, UCI Health is employing rows of humming heat pumps installed on the rooftop.
“The largest array I think this side of the Mississippi,” Brothman said.
A floor below, indoors, racks of centrifugal chillers that control the refrigerant make him smile.
“I love the way they sound,” Brothman said. “It sounds like a Ferrari sometimes, like an electric Ferrari.”
While most of the complex is nonpolluting, there is one place where dirty energy is still in use: the diesel generators that are used for backup power. That’s due in part to the fact that plans for the complex were drawn up six years ago. Solar panels plus batteries have become much more common for backup power since then.
Blackouts are bad for everyone, but they are unacceptable for hospitals. If an emergency facility loses power, people die.
So four 3-megawatt diesel generators sit on the roof of the facility’s central utility plant. Underground tanks hold 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel to supply them. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Fire Protection Associates have codes that require testing the generators once a month at 30% power for half an hour, Brothman said.
The emissions from burning that diesel that are real, he conceded. But “it’s not something that you want to mess around with.”
Normally a central utility plant for a large facility like this would be “very noisy. It’s grimy. Usually there’s hazardous chemicals,” Brothman, who has manged physical plants for many years, said. “Here there’s no combustion. No carbon monoxide.”
Tony Dover, Energy Management & Sustainability Officer at UCI Health, said the building project team is currently applying for LEED Platinum certification, the highest level the U.S. Green Building Council awards for environmentally sustainable architecture.
Most of the energy and pollution savings at the hospital come from the way the building is run. But that only tells part of the story. The way the building is constructed in the first place is also a major consideration for climate change. Concrete is particularly damaging for the climate because of the way cement is made. Dover said lower carbon concrete was used throughout in the project.
Alexi Miller, a mechanical engineer and director of building innovation at the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that gives technical advice on climate and buildings, said the new UCI hospital is a milestone and he hopes to see more like it.
There are things Miller think they could have done differently. He’s not so much worried about using diesel generators for backup power, but he did suggest that a solar-plus-storage system might have been better than what UCI ended up with. Such systems, he said, “refuel themselves.” They would be “getting their fuel from the sun rather than from a tanker truck.”
One area Miller believes UCI could have done better: the hot water heaters, which despite being new, utilize an older and relatively inefficient technology called “resistance heat,” instead of heat-pump hot water heaters, which are now being used used regularly in commercial projects.
“It’s a little surprising,” he said. “Had they chosen to go with heat-pump hot water heaters, they could have powered it roughly three times as long, because it would be 3-4 times as efficient.”
But overall, “I think we should applaud what they’ve achieved in the construction of this building,” said Miller.
There are other all-electric hospitals are on the way: in 2026, UCLA Health plans to open a 119-bed neuropsychiatric hospital that does not use fossil fuels. An all-electric Kaiser Permanente hospital is set to open in San Jose in 2029.
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