Decarbonizing Montefiore Einstein: A Path to Resilience

Presentation Description: Healthcare presents a major challenge in building decarbonization, as the push towards less reliance on fossil fuel sources may lead to impacts on resiliency and operations. In the push towards decarbonization, owners of critical healthcare buildings are having to confront major technical challenges to develop efficient, clean, resilient energy systems and operations. Driven by its commitment to environmental stewardship and safety for its communities, Montefiore-Einstein is charting a path of excellence in building and maintaining a modern academic health system for future climate impacts. This is a process of modernizing systems, transforming how their campuses create and use energy, and how this impacts their local environment, community and ensures resilience for its business continuity.
This presentation will present case studies for 5 of Montefiore-Einstein’s campuses to illustrate the range of approaches to decarbonization being undertaken. These campuses contain a mix of inpatient, outpatient, laboratory, classroom and multifamily buildings, and are served by various types of district energy systems, including CHP and microgrids. The decarbonization strategies vary according to space, facility, capital and resiliency needs of the campuses 20-25 years out.
Learning objectives include:
• Identify opportunities and challenges healthcare facilities face in the path to decarbonization
• Understand technical approaches to maintaining resiliency and how existing systems can determine paths forward
• Develop near-and long-term decarbonization projects and understand how to integrate these into facility capital planning.
• Identify sources of funding and life cycle cost strategies for decarbonization approaches

Case Study: The presentation will utilize case studies from Montefiore’s Decarbonization Plan, including three centralized heat pump projects that are currently in early design stages. These projects were identified to both capture unique state funding opportunities and avoid near term NYC LL97 carbon emissions penalties by offsetting steam use through the use of recovering heat from process equipment.

Keywords:  Microgrids & CHP for Reliability and Resiliency