An Italian hospital uses trigeneration to reduce its energy consumption
Posted on December, 20th 2018.
In December 2017 Parma’s university hospital opened a trigeneration plant - managed by Veolia - to improve its energy efficiency. Circular solutions hand in hand with reducing CO2 emissions.
The trigeneration plant produces almost the entire hospital’s electricity requirement.
In 2012, the engineers working for SIRAM – a Veolia subsidiary - came up with the idea of installing a trigeneration plant right in the building. So what’s trigeneration? Everything starts with the hospital’s power station. This produces electricity from natural gas. In operation, it emits heat – known as waste heat. And that energy is usually lost. By installing a trigeneration plant it is possible to recover the heat that would otherwise be lost and use it to heat the building and produce chilled water for the air conditioning system.
In short, from a single primary energy source - natural gas - a trigeneration plant can produce electricity, heat and cold! Opened in 2017, the one in Parma’s hospital is already delivering promising results.
Requirements the size of a huge building430,000 m2 and about 850,000 patients a year. A plant that would be capable of meeting this huge building’s needs had to be designed. And it was a challenge successfully met! The trigeneration plant is able to produce more than 40,641 MWh of electricity - covering almost the entire hospital's needs (81,2%). It also generates 51,262 MWh of thermal energy (i.e. 53,5% of its heating requirements) and 21,407 MWh of its cooling requirements (13,8%).
According to Marco Bongiorni, director of north-central business unit SIRAM in Italy, the installation promises a 18% reduction in the hospital’s annual CO2 emissions. As a point of comparison, it’s as if we had turned off the boilers in more than 1,000 homes! For the hospital, it’s an innovative solution that not only reduces its environmental impact but also means it saves money on its energy bill!
Main picture © Siram