UHN had major representation at this year’s national CHES (Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society) conference, which was hosted in St. John’s Newfoundland (hence, the blog title). I was honoured to speak at the conference discussing some preliminary energy results of TGH’s new central cooling plant. I was lucky to share the stage with our former colleague, Chad Berndt, who was the mastermind behind the project. Chad is now working with the company that delivered the project, Enwave Energy Corp.

The presentation focused on the process of the project from initial data collection to approvals to design and construction to preliminary results. There was a heavy emphasis on data-based decision making as well as some of the key issues tackled by the new system, including:

• Energy cost stabilization
• Increased system capacity
• Improved system reliability
• Redundancy and resiliency of hospital cooling systems
• Reduction in CO2 emissions
• Simplification of building operation

Chiller Plant Renovation Project Process

You can read more about the technical information related to the project here. I would like to focus this blog on the huge energy and water savings that have been achieved. Check out the graphs below that show our utility consumption for our base case year, 2015, compared to data from summer 2018. On all three of the charts, you will notice a bump in May. There was an unusual heat wave very early in the year that required us to run chillers before the deep lake system was fully online. It is also important to point out that these charts are not weather corrected and, in fact, 2018 had 48% more cooling degree days compared to 2015. It follows that during a typical year, savings would be higher.

Electricity Peak Demand Savings:

Electricity Consumption Savings

Water Savings

These preliminary savings results suggest that the project is on the right track to outperforming the conservative estimates of $22M savings over the life of the project. I will post an update to the blog with final savings numbers upon the completion and approval of the final measurement and verification report.

What are people Saying?

The facilities operations team provided feedback on the project, including “the deep lake is rockin” and given the extreme heat, “the system really saved us this summer.” Even senior management took notice:

This past Monday I had the pleasure of participating in “Food on the Public Plate: Lessons from Canada, US and Denmark”, an event put on by Nourish and hosted by the MaRS Solutions Lab.

It was a chance to share the work UHN’s Energy & Environment Team has done looking into local food at UHN, assessing hospital readiness for climate change’s impact on food, as well as some of the existing and planned gardens we have.

Continue reading →

We saved 2 tonnes of ice packs from landfill, the equivalent of one hippopotamus.  image credit: Zoos Victoria

When 8 million tonnes of plastic is entering the ocean each year and 27 soccer fields worth of the world’s forests is being lost every minute, it may seem like being “sustainable” is far from reach. While it may be true that human activities are threatening the world as we know it, its not true that we aren’t doing anything about it.

Around the world, countries are developing solutions to cope with these non-linear issues. I would like to highlight in this blog post one of the efforts made during my short time here at the UHN to combine the economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainability –to try and find that sweet spot.

Well, I guess I should start by introducing myself and what I do here. My name is Rachel (a third year UWaterloo Biology student) and I am the current sustainability co-op student. Aside from the shut the sash program, which has continued to be an excellent energy (and cost) saving program, I have worked on the ice pack recycling program. Every week our research labs at UHN receive hundreds of frozen ice packs in order to keep perishables at their required temperatures. Most of these end up in landfill waste, or worse … biohazard bins! That literally means burning ice. A much better solution is to send them back to the vendor so they can be reused.

The thing is, new ice packs are cheap, and recycling ice packs takes effort and coordination (which means cost). This is an example of when companies have to look beyond just the economic benefit of sustainability. Sometimes the main driver is social responsibility … companies must be responsible for the waste they create, as that has a major effect on the environment. During my term, there have been many ups and downs with this program. In the end, after ironing out all the wrinkles, we have a fairly stable take back program with New England Biolabs (NEB), Cedarlane, and FroggaBio.

Below is a graph of all the ice packs sent back to date (excluding the NEB ones since they have an even more robust program that takes back all of the packaging including ice packs). From January to mid August, over two tonnes of ice packs were returned to vendors and diverted from landfill!

We saved over 2 tonnes of ice packs from landfill – the equivalent of 1 Hippopotamus!

This program is an excellent case of how when someone is willing to push for change and to find that sweet spot, companies can care for all three aspects of sustainability and great things can happen.