Long-Duration Energy Storage for Healthcare
Rewriting healthcare’s energy playbook — from theory to practice
Long-duration energy storage could redefine how hospitals stay powered, stay resilient, and cut carbon. In 2025, Mazzetti joined Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. Department of Energy’s LDES National Consortium to ensure that future is built for the people who actually run the buildings.
Why long-duration energy storage, and why healthcare?
The grid that hospitals depend on is changing faster than the codes, budgets, and backup systems built around it. Wildfires, severe weather, cyber threats, aging infrastructure, and surging electrical demand are turning “reliable power” from an assumption into a strategic risk. At the same time, healthcare remains one of the most carbon-intensive building sectors in the country — under real pressure to decarbonize without ever compromising patient safety.
Long-duration energy storage (LDES) sits squarely at that intersection. Unlike conventional batteries measured in minutes, LDES systems can dispatch power for 10-plus hours — up to multiple days — the kind of endurance a decarbonized grid needs and a hospital can actually build a resilience strategy around. For critical facilities, it opens a path to clean, dependable backup that can complement, and in some cases rethink, the diesel generator.
But the technology isn’t the hard part. Bridging the gap between research and real-world deployment is the bottleneck — and that’s exactly where Mazzetti works.
“The question in healthcare is no longer whether energy storage belongs. It’s how to implement it — safely, economically, and within today’s regulatory environment.”
Advancing LDES with Sandia National Laboratories
In 2025, Mazzetti collaborated with Sandia National Laboratories to help advance long-duration energy storage solutions that support deep decarbonization, grid reliability, and climate resilience. The work aligned with Sandia’s leadership of the U.S. Department of Energy–supported LDES National Consortium — a multi-year, national effort to accelerate commercialization of LDES technologies across the U.S. energy system.
Mazzetti brought something most national-lab research tables are missing: the perspective of the people who own, operate, and are accountable for mission-critical buildings.
What Mazzetti Contributed
- An applied, real-world infrastructure lens — owner- and operator-focused insight brought directly into national-lab research, with a particular focus on healthcare and other mission-critical building types.
- Systems integration and deployment framing — helping evaluate how emerging LDES technologies interface with electrical infrastructure, life-safety and reliability requirements, and the codes, standards, and regulatory frameworks that govern healthcare.
- Sector-specific use cases — advancing the conversation on how LDES can serve as part of low-carbon resilience strategies, including as an alternative or complement to diesel backup power.
- Thought leadership and convening — participating in national discussions, technical forums, and industry convenings alongside Sandia and other national laboratories to connect research with deployment realities.
Why this work matters:
LDES is essential to a decarbonized grid.
As renewable penetration climbs, the grid needs storage that can hold and dispatch power across many hours or days to stay reliable and flexible. Short-duration storage alone can’t get us there.
Critical facilities need clean resilience options.
Hospitals and other essential facilities face growing risk from grid outages and climate impacts — while simultaneously under pressure to cut emissions. They need resilience that doesn’t come at the cost of the climate.
Bridging R&D and deployment is where progress stalls.
Technology performance alone isn’t enough. Successful adoption depends on integration, safety, operations, and economics — at the facility and community level. That’s a design and advisory problem as much as an engineering one.
What we learned: key outcomes and early conclusions (2025)
The 2025 collaboration surfaced a clear-eyed picture of where LDES stands — strong technical promise, real deployment friction.
LDES shows strong technical promise, but deployment remains constrained by:
- Cost and financing structures
- Market design and valuation
- Site-specific infrastructure limitations
Facility-level realities matter.
Space planning, interconnection, safety, maintenance, and compliance are decisive factors in whether LDES moves beyond pilot projects into real deployment.
Cross-sector collaboration accelerates progress.
When national labs, designers, owners, utilities, and policymakers engage together, feasible commercialization pathways emerge far faster than through siloed R&D.
“Through its 2025 collaboration with Sandia, Mazzetti helped shift the LDES conversation from theory to practice — bringing an end-user, infrastructure-ready lens to national research efforts. This work supports our mission of bending the climate curve while strengthening resilience, particularly for communities and facilities where energy reliability is paramount.”
From research to the room: the LDES for Healthcare Summit
In July 2026, Mazzetti convened the inaugural Long-Duration Energy Storage for Healthcare Summit in Salt Lake City — a first-of-its-kind gathering held at the University of Utah, just prior to the LDES Consortium’s capstone meeting.
For one day, the national laboratory network sat down with the healthcare leaders who actually run the buildings. Convened by Mazzetti in collaboration with the U.S. Long Duration Energy Storage Consortium, Sandia National Laboratories, and ASHE — with presentations from ASHE and The Joint Commission — it was built as an owner-focused program, not a vendor showcase. Real projects, candid economics, and the codes that govern them.
What the conversation revealed:
- Resilience is becoming a strategic business issue — discussed in the boardroom alongside major capital investments, not just an engineering requirement.
- Energy is becoming part of healthcare strategy — evaluated through financial risk, operational resilience, utility costs, sustainability commitments, patient safety, and regulatory compliance.
- Technology is advancing faster than codes — making trusted advisors who understand both the technology and how to implement it within today’s regulatory framework more essential than ever.
Beyond the project: designing future-ready infrastructure
The role of the engineer is expanding. Healthcare clients increasingly need help answering questions that are no longer purely technical:
- Should we invest in long-duration energy storage?
- Which technology fits our campus?
- How does it integrate with emergency power?
- What financing makes it feasible?
- How does it shape campus planning over the next 30–50 years?
- How will future regulations affect today’s decisions?
Answering them takes integrated thinking across electrical and mechanical systems, central utility plants, controls, commissioning, campus planning, sustainability, finance, codes, operations, and long-term asset management. Mazzetti is helping clients move from designing individual systems toward designing campus-scale energy ecosystems — where thermal and electrical storage work together, infrastructure stays flexible enough for what’s coming next, and resilience and decarbonization advance side by side.
Key Contributors
