Are We Resilient Yet?

You probably hear a more formal version of this question with increasing frequency and urgency. With each hurricane, flood, wildfire, tornado, earthquake, and black-out, the power grid experiences widespread and often long-term power outages that can have devastating consequences for healthcare facilities.

Without electricity, lights go out. Heating and air conditioning systems stop working. Water stops pumping. Every piece of modern healthcare technology, from the simplest monitor to the most advanced life support system, is put at risk of interruption. Electronic record systems go dark. Automatic doors stay closed. For many, evacuations are ordered to other medical facilities that are still operating, putting additional strain on those limited resources. Even momentary power interruption in healthcare facilities can be a matter of life and death.

Dire? Yes. Unrealistic? No. That’s why, as more and more crises have disrupted critical operations, more and more resources have been dedicated to resilience. In healthcare terms, resilience means your facilities can:

• protect themselves from grid-wide power outages;

• continue to provide care and safety to patients and staff;

• maintain a reliable electricity supply to support their operations without degradation or interruption.

Today, healthcare facility leaders tasked with solving the resilience problem focus on independent, behind-the-meter energy solutions: Emerging technologies like microgrids and distributed energy resources (DERs), as well as proven solutions like emergency generation, energy efficiency, and demand response.

Together or alone, these solutions ensure that a healthcare facility keeps the lights on during power disruptions. But they can also contribute in another, very important way: financial resilience.

In this paper, we will explore how you can monetize emerging and existing energy resilience solutions to provide significant savings, generate important revenue, and maximize the return on your investments.

Resilience, it’s said, is the ability to take a blow and come back. Let’s take a look at the ways you can leverage your energy assets to help come back strong and power through the storm.

By Ray Berkebile, Phil Ciulla, Joe Hayden, Michael Mindell, and Bill Oosterom.