Partners Healthcare System identified a need to significantly impact their energy consumption footprint by reducing energy expenditures and associated annual utility costs by 25% by 2015 over 2008 Baseline Consumption.Partners Healthcare Systems also resolved to substantially increase the use of renewable/sustainable energy sources in their energy usage mix of sources and substantially increase the use of Cogeneration opportunities to maximize energy performance at their facilites.Partners desired to be a good corporate , local and national citizen in their stewardship of non-renewable resourses while improving bottom line performance.
Several challenges and barriers were required to be faced:
1) Collection and synthesis of significant amounts of utility data at each facility to determine baseline usage and costs by end use in a very short period of time;
2) Creation of Energy Conservation Opportunities (ECO's) which could be easily implemented within the context of maintaining existing hospital operations including patient and staff satisfaction and infection control as well as minimizing any downtime of facility operation and disruption to patients and staff;
3)Evaluation of projects which can be implemented in a phased fashion over a multi-year period in a manner to coordinate with other planned capital improvements in the facility over the strategic period and enhance the value of the total capital dollars spent by focusing on using capital expenditures wisely which enhance the 25% reduction goal;
4) Performing the study in a manner to reduce the burden of collecting and synthesizing data on already overtaxed Operations and Maintenance and Facility Planning staffs.
5)Creating feasible opportunities for implementation of renewable strategies ;
6)Creating feasible opportunities for implementation of cogeneration projects with enough advance planning to allow for installation and operation before the 2015 window.

The analysis method implemented by CDM/Jacobs included a multiple team approach to evaluating all the facilities simulataneously to more quickly identify common implemention barriers and opportunities and to identify common types of ECO's based on other Healthcare Experience which would be applicable to most of the facilities with effective life cycle cost implementation and minimal disruption.
The approach also included a quick evaluation of potential utility and other incentives to enhance the payback of the projects.
The approach also accelerated the development of potential projects for review by the various facilities to identify and early barriers which would make the project infeasible and to identify careful coordination with all other capital improvements and modifications to the facility.

The outcome of the Strategic Energy Master Plan has been to identify and prioritize a successful strategy to implement multiple millions of dollars of ECO projects combined with Cogeneration and Renewable projects which have achieved the Healthcare Systems energy reduction goals. These recommendations have been prioritized in a spending program which can be achieved in a multi-year fashion and which is coordinated with other simultaneous improvement projects at the facilities and which will aid the facilities in more quickly implementing deferred maintenance and infrastructure projects which could turn into emergency projects if deferred to far into the future.