Nation’s largest all-electric hospital to open in Orange County

A new hospital at UC Irvine opens Wednesday and it will be entirely electric — only the second such medical center, and the largest, in the country to date.

People experience some of the most difficult times of their lives in hospitals, so they need to be as comfortable as possible. Hospitals are traditionally connected to natural gas lines several times larger than those connected to residences, to ensure that rooms are always sufficiently warm or cool and have sufficient hot water.

But burning this natural gas is one of the main ways buildings cause climate change. The way we construct and operate buildings is responsible for more than a third of global greenhouse gases.

UCI Health–Irvine will have 144 beds and will be fully electric.

The difference is evident in the hospital’s new kitchen.

Yes, senior project manager Jess Langerud said during a recent tour, people are allowed to eat fried food in a hospital. Here, the fryer is electric. “After all, you still have to eat crispy fries, right?

He turned to an appliance that looked like a stove but with metal zigzagging across the top instead of the usual burners. “I can still put your sear marks on your steak or burger with a fully electric infrared grill,” Langerud said. “It looks like it came out of your flame-grilled grill.”

The cuisine, however, is relatively minor. Water heaters are one of the real heavyweights when it comes to energy consumption in any new building, and especially in hospitals. At UCI Health-Irvine, that means a row of 100-gallon, 20-foot-long water heaters.

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1. Four electric water heaters serve the hospital building. It is a 144-bed facility, with no natural gas or fuel. (Gary Coronado/For Time) 2. Artwork lines the hallways near the nurses’ station. (Gary Coronado/For Time)

“We’re dealing with an immense electrical load here,” said Joe Brothman, director of corporate services for UCI Health.

The other most important use of energy in the complex is keeping rooms warm in winter and cool in summer. To do this, UCI Health uses rows of humming heat pumps installed on the roof.

“I think it’s the largest network this side of the Mississippi,” Brothman said.

One floor below, inside, racks of centrifugal chillers that control the refrigerant make him smile.

“I like the way they sound,” Brothman said. “It sometimes feels like a Ferrari, like an electric Ferrari.”

Even though most of the complex is non-polluting, there is one place where dirty energy is still used: the diesel generators that serve as backup power. This is partly because plans for the complex were drawn up six years ago. Since then, solar panels and batteries have become much more common as backup power.

The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Outpatient Care building, left, with the San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Area, right, next to UCI Health-Irvine Hospital.

Power outages are bad for everyone, but they are unacceptable for hospitals. If an emergency facility loses power, people die.

So, four 3-megawatt diesel generators are installed on the roof of the facility’s power plant. Underground tanks hold 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel to supply them. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Fire Protection Assn. have codes that require generators to be tested once a month at 30% power for half an hour, Brothman said.

The emissions linked to the combustion of this diesel are real, he admitted. But “it’s not something you want to bother with.”

Normally, a power plant for a large facility like this would be “very noisy. It’s filthy. There are usually dangerous chemicals,” said Brothman, who has managed physical facilities for many years. “No combustion here. No carbon monoxide.”

Tony Dover, manager of energy management and sustainability at UCI Health, said the building project team is currently applying for LEED Platinum certification, the highest level awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council for environmentally friendly architecture.

Most of the hospital’s energy and pollution savings come from the way the building is managed. But that only tells part of the story. The way the building was constructed is also a major factor when it comes to climate change. Concrete is particularly harmful to the climate because of the way cement is made. Dover said low-carbon concrete was used throughout the project.

Jess Langerud, the hospital’s senior project manager, stands inside a tunnel leading from the hospital to the power plant.

Alexi Miller, a mechanical engineer and director of construction innovation at the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that provides technical advice on climate and buildings, said the new UCI hospital is a milestone and one he hopes to see more of.

According to Miller, there are things that could have been done differently. He’s not so worried about using diesel generators for backup power, but he suggested that a solar-plus-storage system might have been better than what the UCI ended up with. Such systems, he says, “refuel themselves.” They would “get their fuel from the sun rather than from a fuel truck.”

Miller believes UCI could have done better in one area: water heaters, which, although new, use an older and relatively inefficient technology called “resistance heating,” instead of heat pump water heaters, which are now routinely used in commercial projects.

“It’s a little surprising,” he said. “If they had chosen to go with heat pump water heaters, they could have powered it about three times longer because it would be three to four times more efficient.”

But overall, “I think we should applaud what they accomplished in putting this building together,” Miller said.

More all-electric hospitals are on the way: In 2026, UCLA Health plans to open a 119-bed neuropsychiatric hospital that doesn’t use fossil fuels. And an all-electric Kaiser Permanente hospital is expected to open in San Jose in 2029.