“One of Trinity Health’s guiding principals is stewardship to the earth and making sure that we’re being efficient with our resources.”
To that end, Director of Plant Operations for Trinity Health Zach McIntosh says it only made sense when he and his crew were asked how to reduce Trinity’s carbon footprint while also providing a more reliable system for delivering utilities that are critical to patient care.
“It’s a big generator, and the generator, when it runs, produces electricity, but a byproduct of the electricity generation is heat.”
McIntosh says normally that heat would travel up a smokestack and into the atmosphere, but Trinity decided to take a different route.
“We take and we recover that heat and use it to create steam and then, ultimately, hot water for our facility.”
The new $18 million plant is currently under construction inside the Loretto building. Trinity qualified for $4 million of incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act and a $1 million rebate from Consumers Energy.
McIntosh says the goal is energy independence, but this step will make Trinity’s energy consumption 50-percent more efficient and reduce its carbon footprint by 26-percent.
“We’ll create a portion of the electricity, but we’re looking to create all of that steam and hot water production on-site now.”
The plant is expected to be complete by the end of 2026.
