Meeting NHS Energy Targets – New Lymington Hospital

  • Client: Rydon Construction Limited
  • Value: £29.7M

Project:In 2004 Rydon Construction were developing a PFI project to deliver a new community hospital for the New Forest Primary Care Trust. The New Lymington Hospital, which was to be constructed on a sensitive site adjacent to the Lymington River, would serve the local population of 182,000.

The Hospital was to provide 104 bed spaces with a large proportion being single rooms, spread over rehabilitation, surgical, medical and maternity wards. The construction was two and three storeys high, with a total floor area of approximately 12,000m2. The comprehensive mechanical and electrical service installation included comfort cooling and air conditioning to critical areas.

In 2001 the NHS set energy targets for healthcare premises in England. These require that all new capital developments, major redevelopments or refurbishments should achieve a delivered energy consumption of 35-55GJ/100m3 of hospital heated volume.

Preliminary assessments of the design proposals, undertaken by the projects Building Services Engineers Hurley Palmer Flatt, had predicted the New Lymington Hospital would achieve an energy performance of 57.27 GJ /100 m3 and thus fail to meet the required targets. To overcome this problem Rydon Construction Ltd commissioned BRE to review the designs for the New Lymington Hospital with the aim of identifying opportunities for further energy saving.


Contribution:BRE reviewed the designs presented by Roydon Construction in August 2004. This comprised an assessment of the energy performance implications for the proposed building envelope and its services. BRE found the designs to be a sensible standard response to hospital design. Deeper analyses, however, showed that a number of strategic issues could have been dealt with in a more energy efficient manner leading to improved energy performance and substantially lower running costs. The key findings were:

  • The thermal performance of the building the fabric could be significantly
  • improved leading to a substantial reduction in heating energy use and plant sizing.
  • Improvements to window layout and design could significantly reduce lighting energy use and comfort cooling requirements.
  • The electricity consumption used by lighting could be reduced by approximately 50% and the energy consumption of the condensing boilers could be reduced 33%.
  • Replacing black start generators with CHP could reduce installed plant capacity and energy costs.
  • Cooling and heating from borehole groundwater could also reduce the cost of capital plant and lead to further energy savings.

Benefits:BRE were able to bring a broad range of built environment expertise to this project and in particular its experience of the health sector and successful track record of research into good practice. This facilitated an objective assessment of the design proposals and a prediction of the new hospitals future energy performance. BRE were able to suggest modifications that had the potential to reduce the primary energy consumption by 30%, more than meeting the demands of the NHS targets.