Over the past five years, we have helped Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust to cut the carbon emissions from its St James’s University Hospital site and reduce its electricity bill at the same time. Working in stages to help the hospital secure the funding it needed for the improvement works has now allowed St James’s to be connected to the wider Leeds PIPES district heating system, maintaining its resilience and further reducing its carbon footprint.
Wind the clock back to 2018 and St James’s University Hospital – affectionately known as “Jimmy’s” – needed to replace its gas turbine, which provided electricity, heat, and hot water for its sprawling complex of buildings near the centre of Leeds. We not only bid to take on the work, but also used our inhouse design team to suggest a better solution.
Rather than simply substituting like-for-like, we suggested replacing the gas turbine with a gas-fired combined heat-and-power (CHP) plant, which could generate the same amount of electricity, heat, and hot water but using a fraction of the volume of gas. Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust jumped at the idea, which would not only save the organisation money by cutting its gas bill but would also reduce its carbon emissions and improve local air quality.
That initial contract led to a longer-term relationship between Vital Energi and Leeds Teaching Hospitals, which has already covered three phases, and bidding is underway to add a fourth phase. Each phase has not only further reduced the hospital’s carbon emissions but has also improved the resilience of its heat and power supplies.
The first phase of the project involved replacing the 20-year-old gas turbine with a gas-fired 4.5MW CHP plant, which provides much of the electricity, heating, and hot water needed for the site. We took on the designing, building, operating, and maintaining of the CHP plant, which we guaranteed would save the NHS Trust £2.5 million each year.
In the second phase, we implemented an innovative 428kW water-source heat pump installation to use the low-grade heat generated from the CHP engine, alongside a 1.1MW air-source heat pump. Adding the heat pumps has significantly increased the hospital's capacity to utilise renewable and low-carbon heat sources, enabling a substantial reduction in gas consumption and carbon emissions while improving the overall energy efficiency and sustainability of the site's heating infrastructure.
The third phase involved connecting St James’s University Hospital to the Leeds PIPES district heating system. The hospital can now use two 2.25MW plate heat exchangers to draw hot water from the Leeds PIPES network.
