Healthcare Clean Energy Exchange (HCEE)
Health care facilities in the US use a great deal of energy, resulting in significant contributions to climate change, pollution, respiratory ailments, and the accumulation of persistent toxic materials. As energy costs continue their dramatic rise and accelerating climate change becomes a pressing medical and global issue, healthcare leaders will search for strategies to contain or reduce energy costs, lock in more stable pricing, and be good stewards of our stressed and fragile ecosphere. As a result of the growing interest in Strategic Energy Master Planning (SEMP), Practice Greenhealth has assembled a world class team of energy and health care experts. We offer a web-based energy reverse auction program, the Healthcare Clean Energy Exchange as well as hospital-sited renewable energy development services.
The Healthcare Clean Energy Exchange™ is an exclusive Practice Greenhealth membership benefit enabling members to participate in custom-tailored, web-based clean energy reverse auctions. The Exchange is an electronic marketplace with over 250 suppliers competing for business through reverse auction bidding that aggressively drives energy prices down as the energy suppliers compete. Healthcare leaders can contain or reduce their energy costs, lock in more stable pricing, satisfy a greater percentage of their energy needs with clean energy resources, and lead the fight against climate change.
The Healthcare Clean Energy Exchange is designed to help healthcare leaders improve the energy practices of the industry by enabling facilities to benefit from the deepest possible energy market intelligence and participate in reverse auctions that deliver:
- More competitive energy pricing and more strategic use of your procurement staff’s expertise.
- New tools and better information to manage energy costs, and benchmarking against other Practice Greenhealth members.
- A Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, completely auditable, highly competitive and transparent energy procurement process.
Benefits
The Healthcare Clean Energy Exchange and program partner World Energy operate the most efficient and effective transaction platform for energy and green commodities in the marketplace. Over 250 participating suppliers are aggressively competing to secure energy and environmental commodity contracts for green power, electricity, natural gas, renewable energy certificates, voluntary emission reductions, certified emission reductions, and carbon credits.
The advanced platform hosts transactions on the Exchange’s virtual marketplace, utilizing a variety of electronic tools, including forward and reverse auctions, and post-and-respond mechanisms. Practice Greenhealth supports a proven, award-winning platform with deep market expertise, a rigorous end-to-end process, and exceptional data management capabilities.
Participation in the Exchange provides members with a powerful energy management tool and the opportunity to take advantage of custom-tailored, competitively bid, web-based clean energy reverse auctions where Energy Suppliers aggressively compete by bidding downwards to be your energy and environmental commodity supplier!
As a Practice Greenhealth member, the Exchange staff will work with you to utilize our performance-based model to establish and implement a competitive energy and environmental commodity procurement plan. These services include:
- Analyzing your utility records
- Analyzing the current energy market conditions
- Developing a customized energy procurement strategy meeting your unique needs
- Developing a Requests for Pricing document (RFP)
- Conducting a series of consecutive online auctions associated with RFP alternatives
- Preparing a post auction book to fulfill audit and compliance requirements
Potential bidders are notified, key issues addressed, paperless RFPs issued, and multiple customized, near-simultaneous, web-based, real time reverse auctions are run. Multiple auctions increase bidder competition, allow price comparison with baseline “no green” benchmarks, varying amounts of clean energy and alternative contract terms.
Invoice Reconciliation
We provide complete invoice reconciliation benefits on a line item basis – including invoices from natural gas and electricity suppliers, utilities, and pipelines. We’re able to scan invoices into PDF format and post them to a secure, auditable online library. We also take action to correct disputed invoices, issuing monthly status reports.
Reporting and Budgeting Tools
The HCEE creates a detailed “supply profile report" that is available online 24/7. This report includes:
- Total current spend and forecasted costs
- Breakout of all cost components, including NYMEX, basis, and utility charges
- NYMEX hedges and/or fixed price positions
- Dynamic budgeting and modeling tool
The HCEE optimizes energy commodity procurement practices and creates the financial bandwidth to increase the mix of renewable for your purchased power requirements. The exchange is an award-winning, online auction platform for retail energy commodity transactions tailored to energy consumers.The result is highly competitive, optimized pricing on a transparent time bound auction which creates a hyper competitive procurement event as supplier compete for your business providing peace of mind through documentation and transparency.
For more information, visit our Frequently Asked Questions.
Hospital-Sited Renewable Energy Development Services
Practice Greenhealth’s Hospital-Sited Renewable Energy Development Services delivers an assessment of the technical and economic feasibility of hospital-sited renewable energy resources.
Preliminary Assessment – A high-level economic feasibility based on facility orientation, layout, locale, shading, historical weather patterns, local avoided cost of electricity, available federal and local incentive programs, and estimated solar energy production. The deliverable is a site-specific feasibility of a photovoltaic project including a recommendation on whether or not to proceed further in the development of a project.
Implementation Evaluation – The next step in the development process is a detailed system integration analysis. In this phase, we will review existing facility electrical systems and determine the best points of connection based on local codes, regulations as well as refine the preliminary assessment based on site-specific load profile to provide a more detailed look at the proposition. The deliverable for this phase is a proposed single-line diagram noting the electrical interconnection point and a more detailed economic analysis including a description and comparison of alternative financing means and incentive management.
Energy Impact Calculator V 1.0
Calculate your facility’s energy health impacts and costs with the Energy Impact Calculator. This web-based, self-serve tool uses data from the US EPA, DOE, and other peer-reviewed sources to estimate and display CO2, SO2, NOx and mercury emissions as well as the negative health impacts caused by electricity use.
Unlike any other web-calculator (including all the carbon calculators), EIC V1.0 tracks health impacts and costs for such incidents premature deaths, chronic bronchitis, asthma attacks and hospital emergency room visits, calculating these health impacts on a per kilowatt hour/year basis. Users are able to evaluate the benefits of various demand side or supply side clean energy project. The model output provides site-specific health and environmental impacts as a function of the power generation mix in which your facility is located.
