Decarbonisation of Cooling
In the first phase of the project, the hospital was looking for ways to minimise their environmental impact by reducing the carbon footprint of their existing cooling system, used to cool high cooling load areas without hampering their critical infrastructure. To find the right cooling technology, the hospital managers focused on energy efficiency and sustainability, and reached out to ICS Cool Energy for recommendation. Following the analysis of the existing system, ICS Cool Energy’s engineering team recommended maintaining the chillers already in place and expanding the system with six new free coolers, from the ICS Cool Energy’s IFC (Industrial Free Cooling) range.
Adding remote IFC free coolers, showed better results when compared to installing new chillers with a built-in free cooling coil. ICS Cool Energy remote free coolers, designed to cool process water using the ambient air and working in series with the existing chillers, offer a larger surface area and a reliable way to offload chillers for up to 70-90% of the year.
“In the UK, the relatively cool climate and ambient temperatures allow for partial or full free cooling for much of the year, depending on the set point. This means that with the installation of the free coolers within the existing cooling system, the hospital can achieve substantial energy savings on their electricity, particularly between the months of October and April. We have estimated that thanks to the installation of the free coolers alone, the hospital will reduce their carbon emissions by over 95 tonnes of CO2 per year,” said Philip Ayres, senior sales engineer at ICS Cool Energy.
Decarbonisation through Electrification of Heating
For the hospital, maintaining the right temperature, humidity, and air quality is essential to ensure comfortable and healthy conditions for patient’s care and staff’s comfort all day and night. Sanitary hot water is just as vital for cleaning and hygiene in a hospital environment. As the heating system at the hospital was based on aging gas boilers, the management decided to look at options to make them redundant and replace them with a more environmentally friendly and energy efficient solution.
“Over the last few years, innovations in cooling and heating systems have led to innovative designs that can offer significant environmental and energy benefits, compared to the systems that they are designed to replace,” said Philip Ayres. “There is energy that is lost in most buildings because of heat produced by chillers used for cooling. Our i-FH industrial free heating systems can recover, harness, and use this heat elsewhere. As low carbon emissions, energy efficiency and reliability of the system were the parameters that mattered most for the hospital, this was the solution that fit their needs perfectly.”
As a result, the hospital decided to replace their existing gas boiler plant and electrify their heating system by adding a cascade system featuring i-FH free heating and a multipipe unit from ICS Cool Energy to their existing installation.
“i-FH and multipipe units are an example of product development that can create a sustainable heating sector, contribute to mitigating climate change and reducing buildings’ and processes’ carbon footprint. The fully electric driven multipipe unit doesn’t generate any direct greenhouse gas emissions and offers up to overt three times higher efficiency compared to most gas boilers when delivering hot water for heating systems.”
The multipipe units will recover energy by shifting use from a separate boiler and chiller to one single, simplified multipipe unit that simultaneously delivers hot and chilled water. This system uses renewable and recovered energy for the production of hot water and can replace the existing fossil-fuel boiler and chiller system to deliver both cooling and heating for the building with no direct greenhouse gas emissions.
In case additional cooling or heating capacity would be needed, or to maintain the process in case of any failure with the other part of the system, the hospital decided to modify the existing chiller set up keep and boilers as backup.