Breaking New Ground With an All-Electric Hospital

Building on its clinical expertise and in keeping with its unique academic medical system, UCI Health envisioned a state-of-the-art hospital to anchor their expansive medical campus in Orange County, California. In addition, it would be the first University of California medical center to be powered entirely by electricity. The University system has the ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2025. This goal is notoriously difficult to achieve in healthcare, due to its extensive and continuous energy needs, and it necessitated an ambitious and novel approach.

The new UCI Medical Center Irvine will be a specialized acute care, ambulatory care and cancer treatment and research facility, situated on the University of California, Irvine campus. It will provide 24-hour emergency care, personalized cancer treatments and specialist care in a range of other fields, from neuroscience to orthopedics, facilitated by the University in a bid to fulfil its mission to ‘Discover. Teach. Heal’. A key vision was to incorporate nature and the outdoors into the healing process. The site blends the hardscape of the hospital with a natural marsh area, providing views over an aesthetically appealing landscape from all parts of the building.

The hospital is being delivered as a progressive design build project, with tk1sc, a WSP company, playing an important role in a highly collaborative process to encourage and facilitate innovation. The client’s original intention was to reduce natural gas usage as much as possible, but we suggested going one step further and seeking to eliminate all natural gas on the project; a proposal that excited both us and the client. Our approach was therefore to avoid the use of fossil fuels entirely and implement electrification throughout the hospital, including heating, domestic hot water and steam systems for humidification and sterilization, combining all the equipment and functions in an approach that has not been used before. 

This is the first University of California medical center with an all-electric powered central utility plant; and as the first all-electric hospital of this scale for the client, this project broke new ground. Indeed, since there was no existing data to draw upon, we performed significant modelling, made innovative estimates and established numerous firsts. Excitingly, this means this project has the potential to be used as a case study for future engineers. 

To add to the complexity of the project, California is a seismic zone with strict codes to observe which, due to the acute nature of the hospital, meant that all the equipment needed to be seismically certified. Additionally, since it is essential to the safety of patients that the equipment functions without interruption, the authority having jurisdiction required it to be backed up by a generator system.   Furthermore, we had to contend with California’s undersized electrical grid, which lacks the capacity for the electricity required for this equipment.  

Through our innovative design of this all-electric hospital, we have helped to create a world-class facility that delivers not only unparalleled healthcare but is also leading the way in its commitment to a decarbonised future.