Towards Climate-smart Hospitals: Methodology and Pilot of India’s First Nationwide Hospital Energy Survey
India’s healthcare infrastructure is expanding and evolving amidst the growing need for enhanced Indoor Environmental Quality in hospitals, accentuated by COVID-19 and frequent heatwaves, which will have serious implications for hospitals’ energy use and energy-related GHG emissions. It is imperative to make hospitals in India climate-smart using robust end-use energy data. This paper discusses the methodology and pilot of India’s first-ever national hospital energy survey to characterize the energy consumption, Scope I & II emissions, fuel types, and O&M practices. The survey across end-use systems in 10 public and private hospital typologies is based on 75 data points that will be collected from 1000+ hospitals covering all five climate zones of India. The anonymized data will be released publicly, along with analytical and data visualization tools. This paper will (i) describe the survey scope, design, and methodology, (ii) provide learnings and data insights from the survey pilot, and (iii) outline the next steps towards the full-fledged survey. The learnings from and outcomes of the survey methodology and pilot will have broad applicability for harnessing the power of end-use energy data to mainstream energy efficiency in hospitals and even other commercial buildings in India and other countries.
