After 35 years of nursing, Josephine Jorge-Reyes, vice president of Nursing at UCI Health, thought she’d seen it all. But the distinct quiet that fills the nation’s first all-electric acute care hospital is something she didn’t see coming.
“Not many people can say they’ve opened a hospital,” said Jorge-Reyes, who came out of retirement to help open UCI Health ― Irvine. “Much less one like this. I've enjoyed getting to help plan and prepare our teams for the opening.”
Inside, the building feels calm in ways people don’t usually associate with hospitals. There’s no steam rising from a boiler plant, no loud mechanical rumbling and no chemical smells from older equipment.
Bright interiors and quieter systems are part of what makes UCI Health – Irvine’s all‑electric hospital feel different.
“The average patient probably won’t be able to tell they’re in an all‑electric hospital,” said UCI Health’s director of planning design and construction, Paul Da Veiga. “What they’ll notice is the space’s healing environment, a lot of which is a by-product of the all‑electric build.”
Patients and physicians can see energy efficiency in the shaded facades, high-performance windows overlooking San Joaquin Marsh and naturally lit rooms designed to avoid glare and heat. Out of sight, the building relies on heat recovery chillers that reuse waste heat, air source heat pumps that replace gas boilers, and a decentralized electric humidification system.
To support the environmentally friendly design, UCI Health worked closely with Southern California Edison to make sure the hospital had the reliable power it needed. SCE engineers set out to solve a “grid puzzle”: How to serve an energy intensive facility this large in an area where the electrical grid had some potential constraints.
Instead of building new equipment, SCE routed power across multiple existing circuits — avoiding time-consuming and costly upgrades while keeping energy flowing reliably.
UCI Health - Irvine's all‑electric hospital is designed to use less energy while creating a welcoming environment.
“This project wasn’t standard,” said SCE technical specialist Jay Parikh. “From the beginning, there were a lot of unknowns, and we all had to get creative and collaborative to make it work.”
UCI Health’s decision to go electric marks a major step in UC Irvine’s path to achieving carbon neutrality. But powering an energy‑hungry building like this one, entirely with electricity, brought new challenges. With no natural gas to help run heating, sterilization or hot water systems — and only a single electrical feed available — the hospital had to get creative when trying to stay energy efficient.
“The need to be extremely energy efficient drove many of the design choices,” said Fabian Kremkus from CO Architects, the firm that helped design the hospital. “We made sure those choices also improved the patient experience.”
Care teams move through thoughtfully designed spaces at UCI Health - Irvine's all‑electric hospital.
For Jorge-Reyes, the outcome of all this work and collaboration becomes clear when she makes her daily rounds. She sees nurses and physicians talking in bright, open workspaces and families settling into calm patient rooms.
“You’re not stressed when you walk in here,” she said, with a renewed intention to postpone retirement for at least a few more years. “It’s just a beautiful space to work in, give care and to heal.”
Other hospitals are already asking UCI how they did it — interest that doesn’t surprise Jorge-Reyes.
“I look forward to others following suit, especially in healthcare,” she said. “That means we’ll be able to better provide communities what they need.”
For more information about SCE’s clean energy efforts, visit edison.com/cleanenergy.
