Can hospitals that are not in major metropolitan areas use district energy and combined heat and power?
SW: District energy is a solution in which central plants produce steam, hot water or chilled water and distribute this thermal energy to nearby buildings instead of operating individual boilers and chillers within each building. Most district energy networks are located in densely populated metropolitan areas. As such, many large hospitals are situated near a network and can leverage the existing infrastructure for their thermal energy requirements. Combined heat and power is a very efficient technology in which the waste heat from power plants is recycled to permit the plants to produce power and thermal energy from the same volume of fuel. Large hospital campuses are essentially miniature cities in scale and scope, so they are ideal candidates for dedicated combined heat and power plants on-site, regardless of whether or not they are located in a major metropolitan area. Most importantly, by implementing a combined heat and power plant in a hospital setting, the risks associated wit
