Few hospital facility managers currently think of Energy Star as a label that their building can use to demonstrate the administration’s commitment to reducing energy use and being part of a green, healthy community, according to a blog on the FacilityCare website.
“If you talk to commercial building owners and managers, they’ve been trying to get Energy Star for their buildings for years now, and it’s very competitive. Hospitals are only just starting to come around,” said Ben Whitsett, senior vice president with Ridgecrest Energy Advisors in Houston.
Many are starting to come around because this label of efficiency is one more competitive advantage to tout in this age of Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems scores, wrote Megan Headley.
Commercial projects earn the EPA Energy Star label by benchmarking their energy use in an online tool for measuring and tracking energy and water use.
For hospitals, that means looking at energy use per square foot and then taking into account factors such as number of hospital beds, number of employees and climates, according to the blog. Hospitals are then ranked nationwide. A score of 75 or higher indicates that the building is intended to perform among the top 25 percent of similar buildings.
Read the blog.
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