MURRAY, Utah (ABC4 Utah) - In its continued effort for sustainability, Intermountain Health has launched a Remote Operations Center (ROC) to track and monitor energy use at larger facilities. The project has been so successful at finding efficiencies it’s helped save more than half a million dollars in the first year.

The system uses billions of data points to track energy use and find inefficiencies in systems not working properly. In a facility as large as a hospital, inefficiencies can be hard to find and often aren’t discovered until something breaks down.

“To keep a large building comfortable for patients it takes a lot of systems working together just right, and there’s a lot of spots where things can go wrong,” said Matt Wilson, energy management manager for Intermountain Health. “This new system picks up the smallest problems so we can find it and fix it.”

One example of this was a glitch in a boiler which was rapidly turning on and off to maintain temperature at a clinic. Not only was this wasting energy but was leading to a catastrophic failure of the boiler. By discovering the problem early, maintenance crews were able to fix the issue, so it runs properly.

The ROC is currently in use at 16 facilities in Utah and Idaho but will expand to 30 by the end of 2025. In the first year it saved around $300,000 in gas and electricity cost, with other savings coming from extended equipment life, and other incentives.

The new program was made possible with help from Rocky Mountain Power’s Wattsmart Business program which gives incentives and technical expertise to reduce energy use.

Sponsored by Intermountain Health.