2026 Georgia Association for Healthcare Facility Managers (GAHFM) Annual Conference-Designing a Central Utility Plant on a Budget

Designing a Central Utility Plant on a Budget

Pdf Summary

The document is a presentation on designing a Central Utility Plant (CUP) for a hospital on a tight budget while still meeting FGI expectations for resiliency and future growth. It explains that CUP decisions made during design can affect operations for 30–50 years, making early choices essentially permanent and costly to reverse.<br /><br />A major theme is the difference between emergency power and FGI’s broader emergency preparedness requirement, especially FGI 1.2.6.5. This standard requires healthcare teams to consider utility-loss scenarios, system performance under stress, adaptability for future needs, and recovery after disruptions. The presentation stresses that these issues must be assessed, documented, and presented to the owner for decision-making—even if the resiliency features are not funded.<br /><br />The session also outlines the architect/engineer’s standard-of-care obligation to advise owners about risks, document value-engineering tradeoffs, and clearly record deferred decisions. It warns that undocumented deferrals create liability and long-term operational risk.<br /><br />To preserve the future without overbuilding today, the presentation recommends low-cost design strategies such as reserving space for future equipment, adding isolation valves and capped stubs, designing for future redundancy, and leaving control and electrical headroom. These small investments can prevent expensive retrofits later.<br /><br />Two examples illustrate how to evaluate tradeoffs: generator sizing and water-treatment deferrals. In both cases, the key lesson is to translate budget decisions into operational and FGI consequences so owners understand what they are accepting. The presentation concludes with questions facility managers should ask during design to uncover hidden risks, single points of failure, and whether resiliency decisions have been properly documented.

Keywords

Central Utility Plant

CUP design

hospital resiliency

FGI 1.2.6.5

emergency preparedness

utility-loss scenarios

future growth

value engineering

standard of care

deferred decisions