More than £1.4 million is to be spent on improving energy efficiency at Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital.
More than £1.4 million is to be spent on improving energy efficiency at Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital.
The money will be used to replace worn out equipment and will lead to big cuts in carbon emissions.
But the project is also expected to lead to annual savings of £207,000 a year for the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust.
The funding has been confirmed following a bid to the Department of Health for a share of the £100 million it has ring fenced for energy schemes across the NHS.
At the Princess Royal, a gas turbine which has reached the end of its life, will be replaced with a combined heat and power plant which offers “substantial efficiency improvements”, says a report to the trust board.
It is proposed to install what are known as ‘economisers’ to recover heat from the plant’s boiler flues.
The hospital’s worn out chiller plant will also be replaced with a more efficient system and there will be improvements made to the trust’s buillding management system which controls the use of energy.
The trust has been advised on its programme by a consultant from the Carbon Trust.
Total CO2 savings are stimated at 2,221 tonnes per annum.
Work on the scheme will be completed byt he end of next March.
The report says that the trust is an example to the NHS of those organisations which have sought to reduce their energy consumption and their carbon footprint.
“The Royal Shrewsbury Hospital is at the beginning of a 15-year contract that makes huge improvements to what was a very inefficient system,” the report adds.
“In the first year of operation the scheme has saved 4,349 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and resulted in a 47 per cent reduction in site heat demand.”
The trust board agreed to to approve the implementation of the Princess Royal scheme, subject to the terms associated with the grant funding.
