DOE Data on Large Hospitals

Craig DiLouie July 31, 2013

The Department of Energy’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey is one of the most valuable ongoing research resources for the lighting industry, profiling number of buildings, floorspace square footage and other information by building market type.

Unfortunately, the 2007 CBECS was scrapped due to poor research method, and DOE is still working on the next CBECS after Congressionally mandated cuts resulted in a delay.

Until then, DOE published a report on large hospitals (>200,000 sq.ft.). These buildings are interesting from an energy perspective because they operate 24 hours per day, feature energy-intensive systems and service thousands of people.

According to DOE, in 2007, there were about 3,000 large hospital buildings in the United States, comprising 1.96 billion square feet of floorspace, with an average of 644,300 square feet per building. A total of 3.3 million employees worked in those buildings, with an average of 586 square feet per employee. The total licensed bed capacity was 915,000, with an average of 2,140 square feet per licensed bed.

About 93 percent of these hospitals used one or more daylighting or lighting conservation features including tinted window glass (80 percent), reflective window glass (39 percent), external overhangs or awnings (47 percent), skylights or atriums designed to provide light (57 percent), automatic controls or sensors that increase or reduce lighting in response to the level of natural light (14 percent), and occupancy sensors that reduce lighting when rooms are unoccupied (46 percent). About 90 percent of them used CFLs and 40 percent used light-emitting diode lights (LEDs) to light 11 percent and 2 percent of the total lit building floorspace in all large hospitals, respectively.