Vital Energi has been awarded a contract by NHS Lothian to upgrade and improve the energy centre and infrastructure at St John’s Hospital in Livingston, saving 2,649 tonnes of carbon and £644,000 a year.
The scheme will see the existing 30-year-old steam boiler plant upgraded to include a 1.5MW CHP engine, three 5MW steam boilers, and new chimney flues.
Waste heat will also be captured from the laundry area and used to generate heating and hot water around the hospital in order to maximise energy savings.
This innovative system has been designed to divert the high-temperature condensate return into a new 300kw plate heat exchanger to transfer the waste heat omitted from the laundry area and convert it into low-temperature hot water to be distributed around the hospital’s heating system. This will provide significant carbon and financial savings for the scheme as using the wasted heat will provide financial savings of £26,249 per year.
A new smart SCADA monitoring system will be installed to monitor, control and optimise the energy scheme to maximise financial savings, improve supply resilience,l and minimise carbon emissions.
By installing the CHP technology, new boilers and the laundry heat recovery systems, the health board will benefit from significant energy cost savings as well as developing a reliable and effective energy scheme
Vital value engineered a solution at the tender stage when they identified issues with the internal flues of the boiler house due to their age. This posed risks of interruption to the steam supply to the hospital, and therefore Vital has included replacing these flues with new stainless steel flues in order to extend the lifespan of the scheme.
The solution has been designed to incorporate future technologies due to the ability to further modify the system to accommodate alternative renewable systems in later years, as the health board desired to have the flexibility to consider energy systems less reliant on fossil fuels.
Steve Black, account director, from Vital, said: “The current boiler plant has served the hospital well for the last 30 years, but it has now reached the end of life, and is not performing as efficiently as new plant.
“By installing the CHP technology, new boilers and the laundry heat recovery systems, the health board will benefit from significant energy cost savings as well as developing a reliable and effective energy scheme.”
Vital will be guaranteeing the savings of the scheme for 25 years after its scheduled completion in May this year.
