By Healthcare Facilities Today

When Hurricane Sandy blanketed New York with power outages, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx remained operational.

Montefiore kept the lights on thanks to its combined heat and power system, which allowed the facility to operate independently from the power grid, according to an article on the Modern Healthcare webite.

“The next day for us was business as usual,” Feroze Rasheed, Montefiore chief engineer said. The hospital ended up accepting 27 patients from other facilities, six of them from the neonatal intensive-care unit at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan.

Acccording to the article, combined heat and power systems burn fuel to make electricity and then capture what would be a wasted byproduct - heat - and return it to the facility as a source of steam.

Usually, this involves a natural gas engine that burns fuel to drive a turbine, which is coupled to an electricity generator. Hot exhaust from the combustion passes by tubes of water, heating the water into steam. The resulting steam can be piped to the building for heat and hot water or sent to an absorption chiller for air conditioning.

As logical as this sounds - there are challenges in employing such a system - including limited capital for investments, regulatory barriers involving utility companies and physical space requirements. But, according to the article, hospitals, government agencies and advocates for energy efficiency are working to find ways to make combined heat and power more available and affordable.

Read the article.