Hospital Oost-Limburg (ZOL), Sint-Jan campus in Genk today consists of about 100,000 m² floor space. A lot of new buildings and expansions are planned in the future, such as a new parking building, a new critical block, a new energy building, a new nursing block, among others. This new spatial vision offers ZOL the opportunity to take a critical look at the desired future utility infrastructure for the new buildings as well as the existing hospital. Heat, cold and steam production and distribution is a very important part of this.

Today, ZOL already has a historic but innovative central heat production plant based on large central heat pumps. However, an important part of building heating and domestic hot water production is based on fossil fuels, as is the case today in most hospitals in our country.

In close cooperation with ZOL, Ingenium developed a concrete and phased master plan vision for heat and cold production and distribution on the campus. The intention was to provide a sustainable and energy-efficient energy infrastructure, entirely based on renewable sources, which can be consistently applied in all new buildings and will be rolled out to the existing hospital. In this way the existing buildings can also benefit from this new infrastructure and step by step become more sustainable and move away from the current, partly fossil heat production. Important attention was paid to operational reliability, which is very important for a hospital. For the new buildings and planned renovation projects, design guidelines were drawn up for the building designers, so that each sub-project could be consistently incorporated into the overall energy master plan for heating and cooling.