The country’s first all-electric medical campus should be fully open in Irvine by 2025.
Spanning more than 800,000 square feet, and under the UCI Health umbrella, the medical campus will be powered by a central utility plant, an epicenter that will house all the equipment producing the electricity needed to power the facilities.
The 45,000-square-foot plant is all electric and solar-powered and will use state-of-the-art chillers for cooling and heating the hospital. The technology is currently in use at the UCI Medical Center in Orange.
“They’re highly efficient; they run 24/7,” Joe Brothman, facilities and general services director at UCI Health, said about the chillers. “They are a good example of the technology that we are going to be going live with in Irvine that we’ve been using for half a decade now at a highly reliable, highly safe manner.”
Given that this is to be the first all-electric hospital in the U.S., Brothman said, the building and equipment will go through an extensive “commissioning” process, where all the equipment and systems are tested to ensure they work properly.
Then, a team from different disciplines, including design, mechanical and construction, will develop a “sequence of operations” to test if the equipment can withstand different scenarios typical in a hospital — for example, setting a room temperature of 72 degrees with 45% humidity.
The process, Brothman said, is “ramping the system up to its maximum capacity showing us what temperatures and conditions the building can cool and heat itself under.”
Commissioning, or testing, he said, can also show when backup generator support is needed, determine how often the equipment needs maintenance and establish if the manufacturers’ maintenance cycles are adequate.
This process will begin as soon as construction is completed and before the hospital opens its doors in 2025.
“We still do have emergency generators that are going to be diesel fueled…
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