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Studies investigated the patient-care (in-hospital) and outside-the-hospital energy consumptions for delivering the hemodialysis (HD) service. A life cycle inventory methodology was used for this patient-based analysis for two hospitals located in Wichita, Kansas. It was found that, for both hospitals, the actual HD machines consumed approximately 3.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electrical energy per HD, only 8% to 16% of the total energy used for delivering the HD service (in hospital). This increases to 9.6 to 28.9 kWh of hospital billable energy for the whole system of HD machine, auxiliaries, and dialysis water treatment. Converting these hospital direct electrical energy values to natural resource energy (nre) then adding the cradle-to-gate natural resource energy for the manufacturing and supply chain of all the HD consumables, the total is 78 to 149 kWh nre/HD. The nre measures all the direct fuel burned to generate energy and is thus directly related to emissions to the air, water, and land and is a direct secondary impact on public health from HD. The ratio of outside-the-hospital energy to direct hospital HD electrical energy consumption is 4:1 to 7:1, so a broader base exists for improvement than just the hospital. Keywords:energy consumption health care footprint hemodialysis industrial ecology life cycle inventory (LCI) medical-based energy Supporting information is available on the JIE Web site

The United States healthcare spending was about $7,681 per resident and accounted for 16.2% of the nation' s GDP in 2008 and rose to compromise about 18% of the nation's GDP by 2010. As healthcare sector continues to grow so will its consumption of nonrenewable resources such as energy. Most of the attention in documenting and reducing energy consumption in healthcare has focused on the healthcare facility heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting systems. In this paper we take a different approach in order to gain a more detailed understanding of energy consumption leading to environmental impact information of healthcare services. This paper reports on the preliminary analysis of the energy consumed for Computed Tomography (CT) diagnostic service delivered. It is a part of a larger body of work to catalogue environmental impact information for a number of healthcare services and to relate those data to medical outcomes.

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Abstract. Two critical issues in renewable energy are how to make wind energy cost effective and how to integrate wind energy into electricity grids. Within many approaches to cost reduction, wind speed forecasting was mentioned as an effective approach because accurate forecasting of wind speed has a direct impact on the scheduling of a power system, and also the dynamic control of the wind turbine. This research investigates the practical use of Self Organizing Map (SOM) as a special type of neural network based forecasting method. In this paper, forecasting the average, maximum and minimum of one-day-ahead wind speed based on the past wind speed states of the previous 24 hours is the objective.