Greenhouse gas emissions are a known contributor to climate change and the rise of pollution and disease. As a health care provider, we understand that it’s our responsibility to try to limit our greenhouse gas emissions, even as we grow our health care services.
By reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and reducing our overall energy consumption, we are working to minimize our impact on the climate. The fact that we’re also reducing operating costs is good news for our members.
Health effects of climate change include asthma and other lung conditions from air pollution, spread of infectious diseases, heat stroke, trauma from extreme weather events, and emerging pathogens.
Kaiser Permanente has been at the forefront of embracing clean energy solutions, developing standards for sustainable building in health care, looking for ways to cut back our energy consumption. We take a two pronged approach to this:
Maximizing Energy Efficiency
Kaiser Permanente looks for ways to gain efficiencies in our use of energy throughout all of our facilities. We are committed to monitoring our greenhouse gas emissions as an organization and working to strike the balance between organizational growth and environmental impact.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions by All Kaiser Permanente Operation in 2010
Download our latest greenhouse gas emissions report.
Switching to Renewable Energy
Kaiser Permanente is constantly seeking to increase the use of renewable energy to reduce our use of fossil fuels.
We recently embarked on a project to deploy 15 megawatts of solar power on 15 Kaiser Permanente facilities across California. The solar panels are the equivalent of taking more than 3,000 cars off the road and will reduce approximately 15,890 metric tons of CO2 emissions from Kaiser Permanente facilities per year.
Kaiser Permanente is also installing four megawatts of solid oxide fuel-cell generated power across seven of its facilities in California. The four megawatts of fuel-cell power are expected to reduce Kaiser Permanente’s use of fossil fuels for electricity by 34 percent at the locations where they are installed.
Download the latest factsheet on our efforts to respond to climate change.
What you can do
- During the daytime, turn off the lights and use natural lighting. When possible open your blinds to brighten up the room.
- Turn off coffee machines, televisions, fans and other small appliances that would otherwise remain on. Look for opportunities to unplug office devices like phone chargers when not in use — they still consume energy even when they are not being used.
- Shut down your computer and monitor or enable your computer and monitor to sleep for short periods of inactivity.
- Install motion sensors for your lighting, especially in laundry rooms, basements, walk-in closets and garages.
- Choose ENERGY STAR qualified equipment for your home. ENERGY STAR appliances are designed to consume less energy than other appliances when in standby mode.
- Hang dry your laundry. In the average household, clothes dryers are the third largest energy consuming appliance.
