Case Study: Consulting Engineering
CMTA was proud to provide consultation and commissioning services for Baptist Health Hospital’s patient tower addition in Lexington, Kentucky. This project encompassed 913,000 square feet of renovation and new construction to help bring state-of-the-art health care to the Central Kentucky region.
This renovation gives us an opportunity to give our patients what they need. It’s one of my dreams come true.
CMTA was able to bring several value strategies to the table for Baptist Health during this project, including First 30 and Design Innovation. We met with Baptist at the very beginning of the project and analyzed the capacity and the energy usage of the existing central plant. Studying their energy bills provided great opportunity for significant energy reduction.
Because we were marrying a renovation project to new construction, we had to utilize multiple energy-saving strategies to achieve maximum efficacy. A 1,000 ton heat recovery chiller was added to the central plant to utilize waste heat off of the compressor to heat the entire new building, portions of the old building, and all of the domestic water heating on the campus. The existing chiller plant operated with a traditional primary-secondary pumping arrangement. We switched this to a variable flow primary system to increase plant efficiency. This was designed and coordinated to prevent any downtime to the hospital to maintain patient comfort and safety. Additionally, all of the condensation from the air handling units in the new patient tower will be collected and pumped back to the cooling towers for makeup water.
Our overall schedule was impacted by budget constraints, as the client chose to pay for the energy improvements as they went. This led to a multi-phase schedule, as well as multiple bid packages, which we helped the client manage.
The energy savings for the entire campus were so dramatic that during the first winter after the new systems were running, the gas company noticed that the gas meter hadn’t moved and assumed the meter was bad. They sent a crew out to replace the meter, but found that it was fully functional. Thanks to our innovations, there was enough recycled heat to comfortably maintain the temperature without resorting to the gas boilers.
CMTA was happy to provide Baptist Health Hospital with a patient-first energy system overhaul that has decreased energy usage across the hospital’s entire 1,250,000 square foot campus by over 95 kBtu sf yr. Through renovations to the central plant and innovative design on the new patient tower, the hospital has reduced its utility costs, saving Baptist Health over $1 million annually. This energy savings allows the hospital to direct more funds to improving the lives of the people in Central Kentucky, including bringing state-of-the-art cancer center treatments to the region and providing a newborn intensive care unit for babies with complicated medical needs.
