Dell Children's Medical Center Video (text version)

Below is a text version of the history of the Dell Children's Medical Center, a LEED Platinum healthcare facility located in Austin, Texas. In addition to this text version of the audio, you can also watch the recording (WMV 36 MB).

Narrator:
Hospitals are among the nation's most complex, diverse, and energy-intensive buildings. Each year, hospitals in the United States spend at least $8.5 billion on energy, and the amount could easily be closer to $11 billion to $15 billion. Energy costs per square foot at hospitals have risen from $3.89 in 2003 to $6.09 in 2008, and energy is a cost center that can be controlled.

Add to these costs the tightening of regulations on carbon emissions and an imperative unique to hospitals to maintain energy reliability while providing around-the-clock critical care even during extreme emergencies. These realities make the business case for energy efficiency uniquely compelling for hospitals. Efficiency reduces exposure to energy price volatility and offers a highly cost-effective strategy for reducing carbon emissions.

In 2003, planners of the Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas, located in Austin, decided to create the world's first LEED Platinum healthcare facility.

Bob Bonar:
We're currently located on land that's about 730-some acres here. It's the old Austin Municipal Airport, so this land had been vacant for a number of years with grass growing up through old runways.

Alan Bell:
It was a huge collaborative effort to be able to produce this building, working with the city of Austin and working with Austin Energy—with their teams, building inspections, and permitting. We're actually part of the redevelopment of the old Austin airport, so you had that whole team.

Bob Bonar:
As the president of the hospital, my major role was to work hard and make sure we delivered the project on time, met our objectives, and we brought it in on or under-budget.

Alan Bell:
We had set a goal of LEED Platinum.

Paul Torcellini:
LEED Platinum is one of the goals that people can set for building projects. It's a very attainable goal. Certainly, Platinum is the most lofty goal that the U.S. Green Building Council has.

Alan Bell:
This was a number of years back when LEED was just getting started. There was a lot of learning about what LEED is and how it affects a hospital.

Dylan Siegler:
The project team had a mission statement that involved a commitment to make it to LEED Platinum but also a corollary goal not to do anything dumb to get to LEED Platinum. That, I think, is very, very important.

Paul Torcellini:
LEED Platinum is just one goal for the project. You may want to set other goals as well, such as achieving a certain level of energy efficiency.

Bob Bonar:
We had dozens of ideas out on the table that ended up not making the cut. One version was that we were going to have windmills on the roof of the hospital. We found out that if you only have room for six or eight of them, the technology doesn't make sense.

Joe Kuspan:
When you're in a room face-to-face, that's when magic can really happen. We used to have monthly meetings that lasted an entire afternoon, and in those meetings, we would bounce the ideas off each other.

Alan Bell:
We looked at some solar energy items, too. We looked at photovoltaics. We were actually going to get some rebate money for our photovoltaics, but what we found was we were able to garner more efficiency in the energy plant that also created steam and also created chilled water. So we kind of put our money in the energy plant rather than going the photovoltaic method.

Narrator:
The planning team sought LEED points for the central location of the facility, its placement on a brownfield site, indoor environment quality, use of recycled and local building materials, water efficiency, and energy efficiency.

Joe Kuspan:
It's not simply putting bells and whistles on mechanical units that are poorly organized and not well thought out in the building, which is what a lot of people think—they're going to leave it to the engineers to make this building energy efficient, and it's simply not that. It's a totally integrated system of technology and just good old-fashioned design.

Narrator:
Daylighting is one critical energy-efficient feature of the design.

Paul Torcellini:
Daylighting is using the sun to offset electric lighting. There's a huge potential for energy savings there, because you're using the glass to help provide some function in the building other than just views. You're actually using it for energy savings.

Bob Bonar:
The building has four different types of windows in it, depending on whether they're facing north, south, east, or west. We did computer models of what the ambient exterior light would look like from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, all four seasons of the year. We arranged the lighting system in the building to accommodate that so that we can save energy.

Dr. Mark Shen:
My favorite thing about this facility is you can't be farther than 30 or 40 feet from an open courtyard or lights streaming in.

Dylan Siegler:
The way the building is oriented around the courtyards really makes it possible to constantly feel like you have a connection with the outdoors.

Joe Kuspan:
The courtyards were originally driven by the desire to get daylighting, but then we found we could superimpose them with our air intake. That also gave us the chance to get air that wasn't superheated by being up on the roof.

Also, with our distributed mechanical systems, we needed a lot of places for air intake, so we were able to distribute those throughout all of the courtyard spaces. Those courtyards then became visual amenities, because it's been proven that patients with views of nature heal faster.

Narrator:
Other energy-saving features at Dell include high-efficiency lighting fixtures with occupancy sensors, exterior stairwells that don't require climate control, underfloor air distribution, and a reflective roof. To power the facility, the planning team chose an on-site cooling and healing plant, or CHP, instead of an off-site coal-fired plant.

Bob Bonar:
We generate all of our energy for this building, all of our chilled water, and all of our heating steam on-site in a co-gen plant powered by underground natural gas.

Wayne McKinzey:
There are three things that we make here: electricity, steam, and chilled water. The electricity is made off natural gas via turbine. It's directly coupled to a generator and makes about four megawatts of electricity.

The exhaust heat coming off that gas turbine goes over to what's called a heat recovery steam generator. It takes that exhaust heat, 850 degrees, and makes steam up to about 120 pounds. That steam is used in the plant by an absorption chiller that makes chilled water. It's also sent directly over to the hospital.

Phil Risner:
For code purposes in a hospital, you have to have some amount of reheat. We use the steam to make hot water and then distribute hot water throughout the hospital. The other use is sterilization. The instruments they use for surgery have to be cleaned and processed. We do that in-house and use autoclaves to do it. So, we have a steam demand for that. The other use is the kitchen.

Wayne McKinzey:
The chilled water that we make goes directly to the hospital. It also goes into underground loops out here and serves the customers in the area. Overall efficiency runs about 70 percent. That's when we take the gas we're firing in the gas turbine, making electricity, and then the waste heat coming off that turbine we make steam.

Alan Bell:
Because we have the energy plant across the street, 1 BTU into the energy plant came out at about 0.75 BTUs into the hospital. If we were pulling energy from the Fayette County plant, which is a coal-fire plant about 70 miles from here, 1 BTU into that plant was about 0.29 BTUs coming into the hospital. So you can see that huge loss.

Joe Kuspan:
In addition, we were taking the steam that would normally be going up a smokestack that drives the turbines, and that goes into a thermal storage tank. It's using absorption chillers that are made into chilled water. All of that stuff would normally just go up the smokestack as a waste product.

Narrator:
The strategic placement of the right-sized air-handling units inside the hospital also added significant energy savings.

Phil Risner:
We tried to stack the units on a floor-to-floor basis to at least have them in close proximity so when our chilled water and heated water were distributed, it ends up pretty close, so you don't have a lot of pipe runs and that type of thing. We designed our ductwork with low velocity and low friction loss so we maximized our energy performance as far as the distribution system was concerned.

Joe Kuspan:
We were able to achieve some pretty interesting things in terms of how we distributed mechanical units throughout the building in order to minimize some of the duct runs. That gave us energy savings by having smaller fan motors.

Narrator:
Many energy-efficiency improvements yield short payback periods and return on investment, and offer significant savings in O&M costs, money that every hospital would prefer to direct to mission-critical priorities.

Joe Kuspan:
The obvious way to measure results for this building would be to look at energy data. The facilities department has kept meticulous data in terms of how to fine-tune and tweak this building over the course of its operation.

Paul Torcellini:
Commissioning is an important part of the process. It really takes the design intent and what was built from a construction point of view and makes sure when you gain ownership of the building, that building is going to operate as you intended it to operate.

Joe Kuspan:
You can do commissioning of a building, which is normally part of the LEED process that we went through on this building and then what's called "enhanced commissioning." We went well beyond that with this building to fine-tune it, tweak it, and really get it to match up with the data that was predicted in the energy model.

Paul Torcellini:
The best commissioning plans are established with design so you know what hardware you have, you know what the design intent is, and then you have a group of professionals come in and actually make sure the building is operating according to that sequence of operations.

Narrator:
For Dell, the bottom-line impact has been significant.

Jesus Garza:
The energy difference between this facility and our other facilities is about 10 to 20 percent. That's what we realize in terms of the energy conservation coming off this building. That's significant given it's a 24/7 operation.

Bob Bonar:
On top of that, we've seen lower staff turnover, particularly lower nursing turnover. The staff turnover issue has a positive financial benefit as well. It costs about $80,000 to replace a nurse by the time you hire him or her, train, orient, and get them at the bedside.

We have one of the highest promotor score levels in our system, and that has to do with whether or not patients will recommend us to a friend or a relative. Our scores there are very high, especially for a hospital of our size.

Jesus Garza:
When it comes to environmental conservation or conservation of resources, it is a bucket that you're saving. All doesn't flow necessarily to your bottom line, but it makes the whole a lot better.

Bob Bonar:
I would convey to my peers to consider a multitude of ideas and then tailor them to your budget. The second piece of that is to think about what impact the operating efficiencies of the building are going to have, not over the next five or six years, but over the next 40, 45, or 50 years, which will generally be the lifespan of a building of this nature.

Joe Kuspan:
Green buildings can be done on a typical building budget and achieve pretty spectacular results if you fully integrate it. The architect listens to the engineers and the engineers listen to the architects, and we all work well together in a highly, tightly integrated way.

Jesus Garza:
Sometimes you have to almost take a leap of faith to say, "This is the right thing to do." It does give us some benefit in terms of energy conservation, and then it allows you to be able to make future decisions in terms of how you ought to proceed with other projects.

Narrator:
The LEED Platinum Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas is an exciting example of the design and construction of an energy-efficient hospital. To learn more, visit commercialbuildings.energy.gov/alliances.