Energy efficiency is a major tool to cut bills and pollution, and hospitals are among major energy consumers that often lack the resources to carry out efficiency programs.
A first meaningful result reached by the consortium, was to create an European format for data collection on energy system in hospitals, abiding to all EU norms and national standards. Often only part of the information required by the format can be retrieved from hospitals.
E3, the prototype software tool that the consortium developed for predicting the energy behavior of medical centers and that can help to follow an energy efficiency program, is innovative also on the following issues
1) Measurement and Verification Plans (M&V)
According to the ISO 50015:2014 energy efficiency programs should include sound M&V plans, which often means relying on IPMVP protocol. It envisages 4 options to set a such a plan and to quantify the savings achieved. While setting the baseline for option A and B ( field measurement of key parameters directly related or not to the retrofits) may be easy, it si much more complicated for options C and D (measuring or simulating energy use of the whole facility before and after the retrofit), which are more suitable when the performance reporting needs to be at the facility level (which often happens) and often saving are estimated in a rather simplistic way.
E3 Innovation: It defines the baseline, calculates energy performance, and savings, according to the input data that can be changed for get different scenarios
2) ISO 5001 Certification - which is now compulsory for any ESCO company wishing to bid on large contracts
ISO 50001 provides a framework to establish energy management best practices and thus help organisations to improve their energy efficiency while making a return on their investment. It is applicable to any organisation and require that every year, managers shouold define an energy efficiency plan (even based on small changes, behavioural or physical ones). Again, the concept of baseline is at the core of this system.
At present, without relying on the E3 tool, ESCO companies are at pains to prepare such plans while abiding to the requirements of ISO 5001 Certification bodies, and have to rely on data fomr energy bills and then develop a homemaid regression analysis. This might look as a quite biased methodology and would work only in case of routine adjustments, i.e. without significant changes in the energy consumption behaviour due for example to the opening a new ward in the hospital, while it disregards non-routine adjustments, which in are frequent in a hospital during the 15 years of an average ESCO contract.
E3 Innovation:The E3 tool is able to calculate the routine and non-routine adjustments in a rather transparent way and relying on an unbiased algorithm set by highly esteemed European research centers, solving this issue in a scientific way for M&V pland more suitable for reporting at facility level, as it is customary for signiificant contracts
