The air-to-water system works by fans drawing air into an evaporator where a refrigerant creates a gas, and then creates heat by compressing the gas and sending it into the heating system. This system can create heat even when outside air is cold. The system, effectively, works in reverse to cool the buildings.
Construction on the hub will begin in late 2024 with a completion date in spring of 2027, two years before the new tower opens in 2029. The hub will be located on the Southwest corner of the tower site on West Grand Boulevard.
“As a health system, we plan to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” said Robin Damschroder, executive vice president and chief financial and business development officer for the Detroit-based health system. “What will be happening inside the Central Energy Hub is a meaningful example of how we are making our sustainability pledges a reality.”
While the four-story, 30,000-square-foot energy hub will only provide for the new buildings related to the new tower, Henry Ford Health said it plans to transition the entire campus to electric in the future.
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The new hospital tower — 21 floors and 877 patient rooms — will become the second all-electric hospital in the nation when it opens.
UCI Health, the medical center affiliated with University of California-Irvine, is constructing a 350,000-square-foot acute care hospital with 144 inpatient beds on the UCI Health campus that will be the nation’s first all-electric hospital.
Both Henry Ford Health and UCI Health noted health concerns from using natural gas as reasons to move toward the electric heat pump systems.
"Natural gas has been shown to contribute to pollution and asthma, so by limiting and eventually eliminating the need for natural gas in the new hospital facilities, Henry Ford Health will make a positive impact on the environment as well as set an example for other health systems looking to make an impact in sustainability,” Henry Ford Health wrote in a statement on their website.
“If our operations are contributing to negative health externalities, especially disproportionately in underserved populations that have historically had negative health effects because of energy, we’re not fulfilling our mission,” Joe Brothman, director of facilities and general services for UCI Health, told the Los Angeles Times when their project was announced in April last year.
Earlier this month, Henry Ford Health celebrated the groundbreaking of a 335,000-square-foot research facility on the site next to Henry Ford Health’s One Ford Place headquarters in New Center. The $335 million Henry Ford Health + Michigan State University Health Sciences Research Center is scheduled to open in 2027 and will be the first physical materialization of the 30-year partnership signed between Henry Ford Health and MSU in 2021. It’s also the first shovel in the ground for Henry Ford Health’s overall $3 billion Future of Health redevelopment of the New Center area.
This story first appeared in Crain's Detroit Business.
