Hawaiian Punch: Hospital Knocks Out Wasteful Spending on Energy

Story from Distributed Energy

CLEVELAND -- Dennis J. Burns and Michael Kim Seu of The Queen's Medical Center (QMC), Honolulu, Hawaii, ever aggressive about using advanced technologies to cut operating costs such as energy consumption -- QMC is the only hospital in the state with its own aquifer -- agree that it was a simple cost-of-light tool from GE Consumer & Industrial, presented by GE Lead Account Manager Glenn Sameshima, that planted the seed a couple years ago for the hospital's latest, enterprise-wide energy initiative. "We had plenty of motivation for this comprehensive lighting retrofit," says Kim Seu, manager of general maintenance for the 146-year-old hospital. Electric bills averaging $375,000 a month in 2004 previously had been increasing three to five percent every year, while oil price increases were regularly passed on to energy users such as QMC, by utilities, in the form of "energy cost adjustments." "Our base kilowatt consumption wasn't increasing substantially, adds Kim Seu. "But our energy costs were just climbing and climbing and climbing -- ever upward. Still, we knew our administrative council would want solid proof that spending big money on new lighting technologies would provide a fast and generously proportioned payback." Mark Battaglia of Grainger, a leading distributor of facilities maintenance supplies, and members of his team worked in tandem with GE's Sameshima to inform both Kim Seu and Burns, manager of facilities and biomedical engineering, about how a new mix of GE Consumer & Industrial lighting products could lower QMC's overall cost of light. In addition, the Grainger team customized the inventory process to accommodate the project, helped to establish compliance with QMC's national purchasing contract, facilitated the delivery of the lighting products from the local Grainger branch and coordinated the relationship with the contractor. Both companies hosted Kim Seu and Burns at a Grainger Industrial Supply VIP conference at the Lighting Institute on GE's Nela Park campus in Cleveland, where new GE technologies and products could be demonstrated alongside existing or standard solutions in use at QMC. The icing on the cake, according to Burns, was an extensive lighting audit conducted by Darren Kimura of Energy Industries, an energy services company. Out with the old, in with the new "We would be doing a disservice to our community, our patients, our staff and all QMC stakeholders," says Burns, "if we didn't aggressively seek out ways to improve our facilities and our bottom line." About 90 percent of the QMC lighting retrofits, excluding the 7-story Miller Street Garage, involved the removal of over 22,300 F32T8 linear fluorescent lamps and over 15,000 standard electronic ballasts and the installation of highly efficient F28T8 linear fluorescent lamps and UltraMaxâ„¢ ballasts from GE Consumer & Industrial. "The interoperability of GE's F28T8 UltraMax System gave us additional energy savings, on top of the wattage decrease," reports Kim Seu. "Our patients, staff and security team have all had high praise for the new lighting, which provides equal or better light output and better color rendering than the previous system." The initiative also involved newly installed reflectors for enhanced light output and energy-saving occupancy sensors, components of the comprehensive new lighting system recommended by Kimura of Energy Industries. In the Miller Street Garage -- two other garages are slated for similar retrofits -- a total of 7 floors were outfitted with 93 54-watt T5 linear fluorescent lamps (two per fixture). These replaced 173 150-watt standard metal halide lamps (one per fixture). According to QMC, lowering the watts per fixture and number of fixtures on each level of the garage amounts to a 30-percent reduction in electrical consumption. As a bonus, the retrofit has netted QMC over $25,000 worth of rebates from Hawaiian Electric Company. After the forecasted 18-month payback period for the full project -- 11 buildings plus the garage -- QMC will continue to realize comparative savings of $250,000 every year (based on a rate of $0.14 per kWh). "Queen's Medical Center has fully embraced lighting best practices," notes Gerry Frank, regional sales vice president at Grainger. "Their use of energy-efficient GE lighting products provides peer organizations with a great template for cutting operating and maintenance expenses." Based on their track record of achievement, Burns and Kim Seu will likely be finding ways to save QMC even more money leading up to and beyond the payback period of this lighting retrofit. "It's a never-ending quest," concludes Burns. (Photos courtesy of The Queen's Medical Center.) GE Consumer & Industrial spans the globe as an industry leader in major appliance, lighting and integrated industrial equipment, systems and services. Providing solutions for commercial, industrial and residential use in more than 100 countries, GE Consumer & Industrial uses innovative technologies and "ecomagination," a GE initiative to aggressively bring to market new technologies that help customers and consumers meet pressing environmental challenges, to deliver comfort, convenience and electrical protection and control. General Electric (NYSE: GE) brings imagination to work, selling products under the Monogram®, Profile™ GE®, Hotpoint®, SmartWater™ Reveal® and Edison™ consumer brands, and Entellisys™ industrial brand. For more information, consumers may visit www.ge.com.