Hospital Energy Alliance: HVAC—Cleveland Clinic Video (Text Version)

Below is a text version of the Hospital Energy Alliance HVAC video about the use of innovative HVAC concepts at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.

Narrator:
The Cleveland Clinic main campus in Cleveland Ohio has incorporated an innovative H.V.A.C. system into the Miller Family Pavilion, a building completed in 2008 and the entrance for the Clinic.

Christina Vernon:
We've established 2008 as our initial baseline and are measuring what's called our tier one and tier two or scope one and scope two emissions, which is our direct consumption of fuels onsite, and our resultant emissions from energy consumption. And over 80 percent of that is directly attributable to electricity consumption. And with about 40 percent of our energy coming from HVAC, HVAC is a huge opportunity for us to impact our carbon footprint.

John D'Angelo:
You build in a very large redundancy or factor of safety, so you oversize a lot of your plant. And so some of the studies that are coming out of Carnegie Mellon and some other areas are giving us the information that allows us to maintain that same level of redundancy without having to keep the oversizing. And so that oversize reduction reduces not only your initial cost but your whole life-cycle cost of your system.

Burcu Akinci:
In Cleveland Clinic, there's a big move towards using Building Information Modeling not only just for construction but facility operations. You used to get a blueprint at the end of construction. Those drawings get outdated immediately because these facilities are very dynamic, and they're changing continuously.

John D'Angelo:
Lots of studies have shown that as soon as a building's systems are put in operation, small changes start to move that building out of its original design operating parameters.

Joel Loveland:
We're really in a different world than we were 10 years ago, where we were looking at modeling to understand the energy tradeoffs and financial tradeoffs between individual systems. Now we're really worried about those things and, is the building going to actually perform as we designed it?

John D'Angelo:
Continuous commissioning allows those operating parameters to be continually adjusted as the occupants need to make those small changes.

Burcu Akinci:
BIM provides a digital archive; very rich information about the facility itself: the spaces, the components, the linkages between these different components.

John D'Angelo:
One of the first effects that you're able to see off of using your Building Information is, you're able to understand how your fans and your pumps are actually operating. So what a lot of hospitals have started doing, and we've really invested heavily in, is installing variable-speed drives that allow the pump or the fan to work at the optimal speed using the optimal amount of power for the system needs at that moment.

William Peacock:
We've reduced our energy consumption from just over 300,000 BTU per square foot to just below 240,000 BTU per square foot over the last two to three years, and that's with adding three million square feet to the main campus alone.

John D'Angelo:
We've been able to save a good 10 percent of our energy footprint per year over the last two years, which is about a 4.3-million-dollar savings per year.