Green success stories are coming in fast and furious these days, but here’s one that definitely stands out from the crowd. The Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, a new 500,000-square-foot, $200 million facility designed to be certified at the LEED-Platinum level, uses a natural gas-fired combined heat and power turbine to generate all its electricity.

Now, there are a lot of stories in that sentence alone, but the real story here is that the owner – Seton Healthcare Network – didn’t have to pay a dime for the plant that was built on its site! Austin Energy built the $18 million plant and will sell energy back to the medical center at or below market value. In addition, the medical center uses the byproduct steam in its absorption chillers to meet all the facility’s chilled water needs. In total, the plant saved the medical center about $6 million, money that was used on other sustainable features its designers believe will make Dell the first ever LEED-Platinum-certified health care facility.

The CHP plant also helped garner the facility a bunch of extra LEED points.
“The only way we could have gotten to Platinum was with the help of Austin Energy and the cogen plant,” says Joe Kuspan, senior vice president, director of design for Karlsberger, the lead architect.

Here are some stats from this extraordinary project, provided by Karlsberger:
- 4.5MW natural gas-fired turbine supplies 100 percent of the hospital’s electricity
- 75 percent more efficient than coal-fired power plants
- Lower emissions of nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide as a result of efficient combustion chamber technology
- Steam, a byproduct of the conversion process, is utilized by the hospital and in absorption chillers to produce all of the hospital’s chilled water needs
- Enhanced quality of power assuring smooth, continuous operation of clinical devices
- Two electrical feeds from different substations in the surrounding power grid provide 100% electrical redundancy
- Emergency generator provided for the CHP black start up provides a third back-up for life safety systems, allowing the hospital to be fully operational in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

Look for more about the green features of the Dell Children's Medical Center in the cover story of December's Building Operating Management.