Why it’s important to share the lessons learnt from decarbonising our schools and hospitals

Author: Jack Howlett, is energy and carbon programme manager, Salix

We interact with public sector buildings throughout our lives, but few as directly as hospitals and schools. They are where most of us are born, go to learn and look to when in our hour of need. 

How these sectors approach decarbonisation and learning from the contrasting experiences can shape public perception and wider economy decarbonisation strategies. This is because schools and hospitals are high visibility, often deeply entrenched in their communities and still with a high level of public trust. The energy efficiency strategies they undertake therefore can offer leadership for the communities they serve.

Public concerns around energy are increasingly vocalised, with increasing energy bills, concerns around the quality of our air, especially in major towns and cities and the changes to weather patterns. 

To support the public sector, the government has offered funding schemes to decarbonise buildings through retrofits and heating system replacement. Hospitals and schools are just some of the buildings that are eligible for these programmes.

Hospitals are often large, complex buildings that use vast amounts of energy to keep the climate of the building at the optimal level for recovery, they also usually have energy intensive equipment and the need for regular sterilisation, which all occur in a building that never turns off and must never fail. 

On the other hand, schools are usually smaller, with small village primary schools potentially only being a few rooms. These schools have a far smaller energy demand, with energy usually only being required for up to a third of a day and closed for holidays. 

Nevertheless, they have their own challenges, with much smaller budgets for decarbonisation works, old equipment and limited fabric improvements made previously. These contrasts are key, however for getting the most out of our learnings to guide best practice across the wider built environment.

Hospitals often have their greatest challenge in their need for resilience and continuity. 

The energy they use is for life support - any disruption could be life threatening. 

We have often seen the decarbonisation of hospitals take a phased approach to alleviate potential disruption, with different projects undertaken at different times and depending on the longer term maintenance plan for the building, for example a full fabric retrofit of a ward may not take place, due to the impact on every day running, but could be done at a different time when refurbishment was already planned. 

A key area where we have seen the need for resilience is in the heating system, with hospitals looking to retain parts of a fossil fuelled heating systems to be utilised as a backup, in case the low carbon heating (LCH) system fails.

However, we have also seen that LCH systems can add to the security of an energy supply, through diversification, such as by adding their own energy generation in the form of solar or wind, or more recently utilising a geothermal source to provide stable low carbon heat from the earth. 

The size of hospitals allows this diversified approach to decarbonisation and shows that there does not have to be a trade-off between decarbonisation and resilience. 

Schools, often have their greatest challenge in requiring simplicity and cost effectiveness. School maintenance budgets are tight, and a complex system is not feasible and needlessly adds cost. Schools therefore focus on building retrofits alongside LCH, to drive down energy bills and make their systems cheaper to run in the long term. 

Key to this is energy generation and efficiency measures, such as solar PV and LEDs, allowing the school to generate their own supply and use as little outside energy as possible, which is helped by schools being closed in the hours of darkness. 

An additional benefit of school projects is the educational aspect for the children who attend, it becomes part of a climate education, and this can also spill out into the wider community.

Across both sectors, the need for external support is clear. Upfront capital costs to decarbonise are high and poor designs or installations can have negative repercussions on the buildings and occupants and impact on the real-world performance of the project. Strong monitoring and verification of energy data is important, as only through this will you be able to ensure that your project is delivering what was planned.

In conclusion, the decarbonisation of our schools and hospitals should not be seen in isolation, but as an important investment step on the way to have greener, healthier communities. 

The values they teach us should be used across the built environment, noting that decarbonised does not have to mean fragile or complex, but, when well-planned and supported can be designed to support the building and its use case.

If sectors are treated as silos, progress will be uneven. It’s paramount that we share these lessons learnt from each sector, so we can create a model for decarbonising the built environment.