In late August last year the St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust in south-west London signed what the Trust’s Estates and Facilities team described as ‘a historic partnership’ with British Gas for a £12 m Energy Performance Contract energy reduction scheme – via which the energy company has guaranteed to deliver £1.1 m in annual savings over the next 15 years. The agreement will see British Gas replace four 35-year-old gas-powered steam boilers and an ageing CHP plant in the boiler house at the Trust’s main acute facility, the St George’s Hospital in Tooting, and upgrade some of the associated infrastructure. British Gas will also maintain the new plant to ensure that the projected savings are achieved while the Trust owns the new assets. The Trust should gain financially – via lower energy costs and carbon emissions, while estates personnel will be better able to complete the many other estate maintenance issues that would otherwise be contracted out at one of London’s biggest acute hospitals.
The estates and facilities team at the St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust looks after a sizeable portfolio of buildings and equipment, at the heart of which is the St George’s Hospital, one of the country’s leading acute teaching hospitals. The hospital is spread over a sizeable estate, has a range of ‘mixed buildings’, and shares its campus with the St George’s University of London Medical School. It is a regional centre for specialisms including cardiothoracic medicine and surgery, neurosciences, and renal transplantation. The Trust serves patients from across south-east England for specialities such as complex pelvic trauma, and provides services such as family HIV care and bone marrow transplantation throughout England. Locally, it serves 1.3 million people across south-west London.
In charge of a recently expanded Estates and Facilities team, where much of the recent focus since he joined the Trust in late 2013 (he was previously head of group facilities at Circle Health) has been on boosting operational management capabilities, is IHEEM member, Peter Alesbury. When I visited the estates office within the St George’s Hospital Energy Centre to discuss the recently signed EPC, Peter Alesbury, who is head of Estates, explained that, although now reasonably familiar with the scheme’s complexities (having seen it progress to the point where British Gas will soon begin updating the current boiler house, and installing four new dual-fuel steam boilers and a new CHP engine), credit for it reaching this advanced stage is largely due to project lead, Rathan Nagendra, the Trust’s energy, sustainability, and compliance manager, and Lawrence Musey, energy and sustainability officer.
Experience on similar project
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