When Bayfront Medical Building opened last year, it became UCSF Health’s first all-electric building, operating wholly without the use of natural gas. All heating, cooling, and ventilation needs are powered by electricity, which eliminates on-site fossil fuel combustion. The Bayfront building received Gold LEED certification in 2024 for its carbon-free construction and renewable energy practices.
Sustainability has been a goal at every stage in the process, starting with the choice to use low-carbon concrete mix powered by CarbonCure technology to build Bayfront. These measures resulted in a 34.75% overall reduction in global warming potential for the whole building life cycle. The Bayfront building is powered directly by Hetch-Hetchy power from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which is 100% carbon-free hydroelectric power. This means that operating the major mechanical systems of the facility does not contribute to any greenhouse gas emissions from direct fuel combustion or energy combustion.
The building is designed with a novel central heating and cooling plant that uses heat recovery chillers in place of traditional boilers, chillers, and cooling towers. In traditional systems, heating and cooling are generated separately, with waste heat on the cooling side rejected through evaporative cooling via a cooling tower. Instead of using a traditional system, heat recovery chillers at Bayfront utilize that waste heat as the primary source of building heating.
This simultaneous generation of useful heating and cooling is much more efficient than a traditional system. When there is an imbalance in the demand for heating and cooling, a cooling tower is typically used to reject excess heat; however, this process of cooling consumes a significant amount of water.
At Bayfront, this load balancing is achieved solely through diverting excess hot or chilled water to a coil in the exhaust air stream, which will heat or cool the exhaust air. Using the amount of heat rejected through the exhaust air stream, an estimated 64% of the building water load is saved annually.
Additionally, the building’s energy use intensity (EUI), the total energy consumed per unit, is approximately 72 kBTU per square foot per year, which is within 10% of the modeled design target. This is, in large part, due to the efficiency of the heat recovery system. Currently, the system is achieving an approximate coefficient of performance (CoP) of about 3.5. This measures the ratio of useful energy output to energy input and is much greater than a traditional heating and cooling system. For heating in particular, conventional boilers have an efficiency of less than 100%, and a CoP of less than 1.
Bayfront is just the first in many UCSF projects now incorporating carbon reduction measures to meet the decarbonization goal of 90% reduction by 2045. Another building, Peninsula Outpatient Building in Burlingame, has also opened as of early 2025, and is an all-electric building with a similar heat recovery strategy to Bayfront
Bayfront serves as an encouraging example to the UC community that the implementation of sustainability goals at every stage of a building project, from construction to daily operations, can optimize carbon savings and make a lasting positive environmental impact.