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The country’s largest and most well known medical institution is in the process of turning green department by department.
The sprawling All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi promises to once again establish some of the best benchmarks just like it did in 1952, giving wings to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s dream of creating a centre for excellence in medical sciences.
This time round along with medicine, it hopes to build a green hospital that also excels in energy efficiency, clinical efficiency and all hospital operations. The project started in March this year after a feasibility study that was conducted by Hitachi Ltd from April 2015 to February 2016 and evaluated by New Energy and Industrial Technology Development organisation (NEDO).
The project, to be implemented in stages, is not as easy as it sounds and will take three years to complete. Hitachi hopes to complete all aspects by 2020, including reducing the hospital’s power consumption by 30 per cent.
“If it was a new project the makeover would be much easier, but as we cannot stop any of the systems, cannot replace everything and it has to go hand in hand with everyday functioning it has to be paced accordingly,” explains Shusuke Onodera, General Manager Infra & Healthcare, Hitachi India Pvt Ltd, who is executing the project on the ground.
The company will build an Information and Communication Technology platform (ICT) to reduce the power consumption. For this, it will install a new photovoltaic power generation facility and update existing facilities such as the chillers and the lighting with highly efficient ones.
Hitachi says the exercise also involves building a system to carry out control, grasp and monitoring of status of energy consumption of the entire hospital. And by introducing energy saving IT equipment, it will accelerate the electronic management of medical image data. Right now every specialised department has its own data, which cannot be shared electronically with another department.
Hitachi’s Deputy General Manager, Anuj Kohli, says that the two-year feasibility study provided crucial pointers to what was needed to make AIIMS more energy efficient. They found that too much manpower was being used for energy management and that the chillers were cooling only 75 per cent.
The company aims to further conserve energy by integrating operational information it obtains from utility and medical equipment, clinical information it obtains from the hospital information system, weather information and others on the ICT Platform and devising an optimal operation plan for utility equipment.
Besides, by the time the project is complete AIIMS will have solar roofs for the car parking sheds and a master remote station connecting all the individual chillers.
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