On Energy Requirements and Potential Energy Savings in Italian Hospital Buildings

This paper describes how most Italian hospitals show a significant rise in electricity demand during the summer. Such a growth represents a high penalizing aspect especially in structures characterized by considerable needs, as the contracts with the electricity provider is normally set to the peak of consumption. An energy policy that would seek a requirement optimization through a cut of the summer peak of the electricity demand could therefore result in both energy and economic savings. In this paper the electricity needs of twenty-three hospitals located in Emilia-Romagna, north Italy, are investigated in this paper. These electricity requirements have been broken down into main end-uses confirming that compression chillers, supporting the HVAC systems during the hot season, represent the major electricity end-use and are essentially to be considered as responsible for the summer peak in electricity demand. The existence of a correlation between electricity requirements and cooling needs has been detected. Finally, a brief survey has been carried out to establish which technologies would best fit with the hospitals’ needs with the aim of a rationalization of the energy demand. Among the different scenarios, solar technologies (e.g. solar collectors) in particular well suit hospital facilities since these systems achieve their peak of production in correspondence of the peak of demand during the hottest sunny days of the summer.