IU Health adds energy capacity to enable future technology

Indiana University (IU) Health is building its new $4.3 billion, 44-acre medical campus in downtown Indianapolis with an eye on future technology needs. The campus has been designed to handle an electricity demand of up to 10.5 watts per square foot, approximately double the capacity of the typical academic health care center. Jim Mladucky, vice president of design and construction at IU Health, explains that this decision is intended to future-proof the campus as technology usage and related electricity demands grow.

“We truly don’t know where the future of technology is going to go,” Mladucky says. “It’s rapidly evolving, and by the time the campus is built, what we’re using today will be out of date. We know that artificial intelligence and other data-intense applications are out there, and so a lot of this is hedging to make sure we have the power necessary to run those things.”

As an example of how technology is evolving, he points to the new hospital’s planned use of autonomous guided vehicles to distribute supplies and transport linens between the hospital and the south support building.

Mladucky notes that his peers in the system’s information technology and internet information services departments have pointed out that much of the growing technology demand is for services housed in the cloud, offloading energy demand to an off-premise server. “That may or may not be the case in the future,” Mladucky says. “We decided to make sure that whatever technology demands in the future, we can accommodate it.”

The 2.56-million-square-foot hospital isn’t expected to be utilizing the full power available when it opens to patients by the end of 2027. And preparing for future energy demands isn’t an exact science. So, to prepare for a tech-intensive future, the planning team spent time early on talking with other academic medical centers about how they future-proofed their recently constructed hospitals. “We had a couple of sessions with [Stanford Health Care] and talked with [Penn Medicine] about what worked for them and what didn’t,” Mladucky says.

For existing facilities, greater technology demand can come at an intense cost. However, the system is planning for energy costs of approximately $4 per square foot in the new facility, compared to $5.22 per square foot at IU Health’s Methodist and University hospitals, also based in Indianapolis.

This is partly the result of prioritizing energy efficiency at every stage of design and construction. The system has targeted an ENERGY STAR® rating of 75 out of 100 and LEED Silver certification. Initial commissioning of the new 78,500-square-foot central utility plant in January 2026 indicates the plant will achieve an 80-plus rating and stands on the cusp of achieving LEED Platinum.

On the other side of the energy cost equation, the campus is laying the groundwork for renewable energy generation in the future. Mladucky explains that the campus design applies guidance from the American National Standards Institute/ASHRAE/American Society for Health Care Engineering’s Standard 189.3, Design, Construction, and Operation of Sustainable High-Performance Health Care Facilities. In addition, the central utility plant was designed with space to be converted to an all-electric system if renewable energies enable the health system to bring electricity costs lower than fossil fuel rates in the future. Mladucky adds, “To set up for the electrification of all our systems there, we had to oversize some of the space because of the increased space demands of those kinds of technologies.”

The system also has accounted for space on its campus for potential geothermal systems and discussed with its electrical utility, AES Indiana, the advantages of developing a microgrid in the future. By evaluating and creating space for all options, IU Health is in a position to more readily pivot in the future.

Inside the hospital — which is nearing the halfway point of construction — the design accounts for shifting away from wired systems where possible. For example, Mladucky says, “We originally had our real-time location system hardwired. We were able to leverage our data drops and our wireless system to utilize that instead.”