As hospitals operate round-the-clock, they face a unique challenge: reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions without compromising patient safety, clinical environments or operational continuity. With HVAC and other building systems accounting for a significant share of hospital energy use, intelligent infrastructure is emerging as a critical lever for both efficiency and resilience.

Against this backdrop, the interview explores how healthcare facilities can move beyond conventional sustainability measures towards intelligent, digitally enabled and Net Zero-ready infrastructure. In an exclusive conversation, Rajarshi Datta, Director – Sales, Johnson Controls – India, shares his insights with Dr. Asawari Savant of Elets News Network (ENN) on the evolving role of AI, advanced HVAC systems, green building standards, digital technologies and outcome-based approaches in building more sustainable, resilient and future-ready healthcare facilities. Edited excerpts 

How can India’s hospitals and healthcare facilities reduce their significant energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining uninterrupted 24/7 operations?

Hospitals do not have to choose between lower emissions and uninterrupted care. The best systems improve both. In fact, some of the biggest opportunities to reduce energy consumption also come from improving the performance and reliability of systems that hospitals depend on every day. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) is a clear example. It accounts for more than 50% of total energy use in Indian hospitals, and can reach 70% in high-cooling-demand geographies such as Rajasthan. At the same time, India’s hospital sector consumed 9% of the country’s commercial electricity in 2019–20 and has expanded considerably since, making the efficiency of hospital infrastructure an increasingly important part of the country’s energy and decarbonisation journey.

The opportunity, therefore, lies in improving how these systems operate. At Jupiter Hospital in Dombivli, Johnson Controls deployed India’s first on-premises, artificial intelligence-powered Chiller Plant Optimizer, improving cooling plant efficiency from above 0.80 kilowatts per ton of refrigeration to a sustained 0.72 kilowatts per ton of refrigeration and saving up to 500 kilowatt-hours a day, roughly the daily electricity use of 80 Indian homes, in an upgrade that also boosts the reliability of hospital operations. 

More broadly, research indicates that hospital buildings have the potential to achieve 15 to 25%  energy savings through intelligent building systems without capital replacement of clinical infrastructure. This means hospitals can begin with the systems that consume the most energy, optimise how they work together across the chilled-water ecosystem, including chillers, pumps, cooling towers, air handling units, and building controls, and progressively integrate measures such as electrification and renewable energy, improving efficiency, resilience, and patient care at the same time.

What role should the healthcare sector play in advancing India’s Net Zero mission, and how can hospitals accelerate their sustainability journey?

Healthcare has a natural role to play in India’s net zero journey because hospitals sit at the intersection of human health, energy use and climate resilience. The healthcare sector accounts for 4 to 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with India’s healthcare system estimated to be the seventh-largest healthcare carbon emitter globally in absolute terms. 

At Johnson Controls, we view hospitals as future Net Zero Healthcare Campuses, and we see this as a practical opportunity – integrating energy efficiency, electrification, renewable energy, smart building technologies, water conservation, and low-carbon refrigerants into one framework, addressing emissions from on-site fuel, purchased electricity, and the supply chain with the same governance discipline applied to clinical performance.

India has committed to net zero by 2070, and healthcare infrastructure is recognised as an important part of that journey. This is reflected in the country’s Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategy, which calls for adaptation in urban design, energy and material efficiency in buildings, and sustainable urbanisation. As healthcare demand continues to grow, the hospitals being built today have a unique opportunity to embed efficiency and low-carbon design from the outset rather than relying on costly retrofits later. Hospitals that move early can not only reduce their own footprint, but also help demonstrate what sustainable healthcare infrastructure can achieve at scale.

How can green building standards such as GRIHA and IGBC help transform healthcare infrastructure into more sustainable and resource-efficient facilities?

The real value of green building certifications, beyond being a necessary compliance framework, lies in shaping critical design decisions early, before construction begins. Late-stage design decisions create gaps in sustainability outcomes and are not financially prudent, so Johnson Controls recommends integrating certification requirements with operational technologies from the earliest design stage, including high-performance HVAC, digital controls, intelligent lighting, renewable-ready electrical infrastructure, water-efficient cooling, and low-carbon materials. From within the green building industry landscape, we have GRIHA, which offers India-specific climate-responsive design guidance. Another example is IGBC, whose dedicated Green Healthcare rating system addresses infection control, indoor air quality, and biomedical waste management. Together, these standards provide a structured accountability framework for decisions otherwise driven by short-term cost.

A certification, however, is a point-in-time assessment of a building that will run for decades, and a GRIHA rating is valid for five years. What happens between assessments is where the outcome is actually decided, because control sequences get overridden during a busy shift, sensors drift, filter load, and departments expand into space that was never modelled for that load, producing the well-documented gap between designed and delivered performance. This is why the digital layer is not an add-on to certification but the mechanism that makes it hold. Sub-metering, a modern building management system, fault detection and diagnostics, predictive maintenance and AI-based optimisation move a hospital from periodic audit to continuous commissioning, catching a failing economiser or a hunting valve in hours rather than at the next cycle, with the US Department of Energy’s Smart Energy Analytics Campaign reporting median energy savings of 9% from fault detection software and a one to two year payback. In healthcare that instrumentation carries clinical weight as well, since the pressure relationships, air change rates and filtration performance protecting an isolation room or an operating theatre are precisely the parameters that need watching continuously rather than sampling annually.

The outcomes for certified hospitals go beyond energy savings. Certified facilities have been found to contain about half the particulate matter of comparable non-certified facilities, with direct implications for clinical outcomes, according to a TERI assessment. True lifecycle sustainability requires accounting for carbon across a building’s full lifecycle. The Indian green building materials market, valued at approximately USD 15.5 billion in 2025 and projected to reach USD 32.2 billion by 2032, shows the supply side is growing to meet this demand. Certification sets the ambition at day one of the project brief, and the digital operating layer is what keeps that ambition true in year seven.

How do green technologies, particularly advanced HVAC systems, contribute to both environmental sustainability and improved patient care outcomes?

HVAC in a hospital is not simply an energy system; it is clinical infrastructure. Temperature, humidity, pressure relationships between zones, filtration efficiency, ventilation effectiveness, and indoor air quality have a direct impact on infection control, patient recovery, staff wellbeing, and regulatory compliance.

For Johnson Controls, the approach is to optimise HVAC holistically, which includes integrating high-efficiency chillers, variable primary flow systems, intelligent air handling units, demand-controlled ventilation, Operation Room Optimisation, heat recovery, digital controls, predictive maintenance, and AI-based optimisation into one coordinated system.

Operating rooms show what this looks like in practice. They are among the most energy-intensive spaces in any building, consuming up to six times more energy per square foot than the rest of the hospital, yet typically being in use for less than 30% of the time, meaning that energy is often spent with no benefit to patients. Our OpenBlue Operating Room Optimisation closes that gap: using multi-signal occupancy detection, it powers down HVAC when a room is empty and restores compliance-ready conditions before staff re-enter, cutting energy waste while keeping the exact temperature, humidity and air quality an operating room needs, so patient care is never the trade-off. At a leading acute-care hospital in the United States, a pilot in two of its thirty-plus operating rooms found the rooms were in use only 28% of the time. The savings recorded work out to more than USD 5,000 per operating room every year, and roughly USD 160,000 a year if extended campus-wide, achieved with zero clinical disruption, including through a network outage, and with full compliance to Joint Commission, ASHRAE and CSA standards. That is the proof that the environmental case and the clinical case here are the same case

What strategies can healthcare leaders adopt to balance sustainability goals, operational efficiency, and high-quality patient care in the hospitals of the future?

Healthcare leaders can accelerate progress in three ways. First being governance, which includes integrating sustainability into executive decision-making and measuring performance through five board-level indicators, energy intensity, carbon intensity, water intensity, indoor environmental quality, and clinical reliability, using Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) key performance indicators (KPIs) alongside financial and clinical metrics. 

Second is lifecycle value, which means shifting from upfront capital expenditure thinking to lifecycle value optimization, since the upfront cost objection that blocks most Indian hospital sustainability investment persists even when lifecycle economics are demonstrably positive.

Third is outcome-based models, which involve structuring sustainability upgrades so they are funded from the energy savings they generate, removing the upfront cost barrier entirely. This is not theoretical. For Johnson Controls, since 2000, performance contracting projects of this kind have helped customers globally avoid nearly 43 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) and are set to save more than USD 9.5 billion in energy and operational costs over project terms, evidence that decarbonisation and capital constraints do not have to be a trade-off for hospitals

What innovations or emerging technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact on helping India’s healthcare sector progress towards Net Zero over the next decade?

Several technology directions are likely to have the greatest impact on the next generation of net zero hospitals. AI in building systems is enabling hospitals to move from reactive to predictive and optimised operations, as shown by the deployment at Jupiter Hospital, which runs on-premises with no dependency on external connectivity, no compromise on data security, and no manual intervention required. 

The Digital Twin, when combined with AI, enables building operators to simulate and optimise emissions before physical investments are made, letting a hospital planning a new wing or an energy systems upgrade test hundreds of scenarios virtually before committing capital.

Building electrification, the shift from gas-fired boilers and direct expansion cooling to heat pumps, electric boilers, and thermal storage systems running on electricity, will also matter as India’s grid decarbonises. The country’s electricity share in final energy is projected to rise from 21% in 2025 to nearly 40% by 2070 under its current policy scenario and 60% under a net zero scenario, making electrified buildings automatically lower-carbon over time. 

Renewable energy integration, such as on-site solar, battery storage, and microgrids, can let hospitals manage their own generation, and hospitals that connect intelligent building systems to the grid can become Grid Interactive Buildings, tied together by platforms such as OpenBlue, connected chillers, digital measurement and verification, carbon dashboards, and fault detection diagnostics into a system capable of continuous, autonomous carbon management.

Read more: Accelerating India’s Biopharma Transformation: Building Talent, Technology and an Innovation Ecosystem

Johnson Controls works extensively on smart and sustainable building solutions globally. What are some of the key technologies and solutions you are deploying to help healthcare facilities reduce their carbon footprint while ensuring critical operations remain uninterrupted?

Our work in healthcare begins from the premise that clinical facilities are fundamentally different operating environments, where the consequences of system failure go beyond operational cost. Data security is a regulatory and ethical obligation, and the tolerance for downtime is effectively zero; therefore, since every minute matters, Johnson Controls delivers a connected ecosystem rather than supplying individual products. The ecosystem is built around high-efficiency YORK chillers with low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants, the OpenBlue Digital Platform, Metasys Building Automation, the Chiller Plant Optimizer, Operation Room Optimisation, continuous commissioning, connected equipment with predictive maintenance, Digital Twin, and outcome-based performance contracting, all designed to continuously optimise energy, carbon emissions, indoor air quality, water consumption, equipment reliability, and operating costs while preserving clinical integrity.

At Jupiter Hospital, Dombivli, our on-premises, non-cloud-dependent Chiller Plant Optimizer runs on application-specific AI calibrated to the plant’s exact configuration, improving efficiency from above 0.80 kW/TR to a sustained 0.72 kW/TR and generating up to 1.5 lakh kWh in estimated annual energy savings, enough to power around 80 Indian homes for a year, without requiring manual intervention. Healthcare organisations increasingly seek long-term partners who can help deliver measurable operational and sustainability outcomes, and it is this combination, an ecosystem approach rather than standalone products, and a long-term partnership rather than a one-time supply relationship, that we believe defines the intelligent, resilient, and net zero ready hospital of the future.

Views expressed by: Rajarshi Datta, Director – Sales, Johnson Controls – India

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