A new hospital at UC Irvine opens Wednesday and it will be all-electric — only the second such medical center, and the largest, in the country so far.

People live through some of the toughest moments of their lives in hospitals, so they need to be as comfortable as possible. Hospitals traditionally connect with natural gas lines several times bigger than those connected to residential homes, to ensure that rooms are always warm or cool enough and have sufficient hot water.

But burning that natural gas is one of the main ways that buildings cause climate change. The way we build and operate buildings is responsible more than one-third of global greenhouse gases.

UCI Health–Irvine will include 144 beds, and will be entirely electric.

The difference is manifest in the hospital’s new kitchen.

Yes, said principal project manager Jess Langerud on a recent tour, people are permitted to eat fried food in a hospital. Here, the fryer is electric. “After all, you still have to have your crunchy fries, right?”

He moved over to an appliance that looked like a stove but with metal zigzagging across the top instead of the usual burners. “I can still put your sear marks on your steak or burger with an infrared grill that’s fully electric,” said Langerud. “It’ll look like it came off your flame-broiled grill.”

The kitchen, though, is relatively minor. One of the real heavy hitters when it comes to energy use in any new building, and especially in hospitals, are the water heaters. At UCI Health–Irvine, that means a row of 100-gallon water heaters 20 feet long.

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1. Four electric water heaters service the hospital building. It’s a 144-bed facility, with no natural gas or fuel. (Gary Coronado/For The Times) 2. Art lines the hallways near the nurses’ station. (Gary Coronado/For The Times)

“This is an immense electrical load we’re looking at right here,” said Joe Brothman, director of general services at UCI Health.

The other heaviest use of energy in the complex is keeping rooms warm in winter and cool in summer. For that, UCI Health is employing rows of humming heat pumps installed on the rooftop.

“The largest array I think this side of the Mississippi,” Brothman said.

A floor below, indoors, racks of centrifugal chillers that control the refrigerant make him smile.

“I love the way they sound,” Brothman said. “It sounds like a Ferrari sometimes, like an electric Ferrari.”

While most of the complex is nonpolluting, there is one place where dirty energy is still in use: the diesel generators that are used for backup power. That’s due in part to the fact that plans for the complex were drawn up six years ago. Solar panels plus batteries have become much more common for backup power since then.

The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Ambulatory Care building, left, with the San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, right, next to the UCI Health–Irvine hospital.

Blackouts are bad for everyone, but they are unacceptable for hospitals. If an emergency facility loses power, people die.

So four 3-megawatt diesel generators sit on the roof of the facility’s central utility plant. Underground tanks hold 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel to supply them. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Fire Protection Associates have codes that require testing the generators once a month at 30% power for half an hour, Brothman said.

The emissions from burning that diesel that are real, he conceded. But “it’s not something that you want to mess around with.”

Normally a central utility plant for a large facility like this would be “very noisy. It’s grimy. Usually there’s hazardous chemicals,” Brothman, who has manged physical plants for many years, said. “Here there’s no combustion. No carbon monoxide.”

Tony Dover, Energy Management & Sustainability Officer at UCI Health, said the building project team is currently applying for LEED Platinum certification, the highest level the U.S. Green Building Council awards for environmentally sustainable architecture.

Most of the energy and pollution savings at the hospital come from the way the building is run. But that only tells part of the story. The way the building is constructed in the first place is also a major consideration for climate change. Concrete is particularly damaging for the climate because of the way cement is made. Dover said lower carbon concrete was used throughout in the project.

Jess Langerud, principal project manager for the hospital, stands inside a tunnel leading from the hospital to the central utility plant.

Alexi Miller, a mechanical engineer and director of building innovation at the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that gives technical advice on climate and buildings, said the new UCI hospital is a milestone and he hopes to see more like it.

There are things Miller think they could have done differently. He’s not so much worried about using diesel generators for backup power, but he did suggest that a solar-plus-storage system might have been better than what UCI ended up with. Such systems, he said, “refuel themselves.” They would be “getting their fuel from the sun rather than from a tanker truck.”

One area Miller believes UCI could have done better: the hot water heaters, which despite being new, utilize an older and relatively inefficient technology called “resistance heat,” instead of heat-pump hot water heaters, which are now being used used regularly in commercial projects.

“It’s a little surprising,” he said. “Had they chosen to go with heat-pump hot water heaters, they could have powered it roughly three times as long, because it would be 3-4 times as efficient.”

But overall, “I think we should applaud what they’ve achieved in the construction of this building,” said Miller.

There are other all-electric hospitals are on the way: in 2026, UCLA Health plans to open a 119-bed neuropsychiatric hospital that does not use fossil fuels. An all-electric Kaiser Permanente hospital is set to open in San Jose in 2029.

When scores of dead and dying sea animals began washing up on L.A.-area beaches just weeks after January’s devastating fires, the timing seemed suspicious.

Harmful algae blooms had sickened marine life in each of the three years prior. But the especially high number of animal deaths this year prompted several research teams to investigate whether runoff from the fires may have accelerated algae growth to particularly dangerous proportions.

The evidence available so far suggests that this year’s algae bloom would have been just as deadly if the catastrophe on land hadn’t happened, multiple scientists said this week.

“Some of the fire retardants have nutrients in them, like ammonia or phosphate, that can fuel the growth of phytoplankton and the growth of organisms in the ocean. And we do see some spikes in those nutrients early on, immediately post-fire,” said Noelle Held, a University of Southern California microbiologist and oceanographer who has tested ocean water along L.A.’s coastline regularly since January. “But those increases are completely dwarfed by the major shift that happened in the ocean between the end of February and the beginning of April — the upwelling event.”

Upwellings occur when winds push warmer surface waters from the coastline out to sea, allowing colder, nutrient-rich waters from deeper in the ocean to rise up and take their place. These surges occur naturally in Southern California in winter and spring and contain elements like nitrogen and phosphorus that feed microbes (algae included). They often precede harmful algae blooms, though scientists are still trying to figure out the precise balance of factors that lead to sudden explosions in toxin-producing algae species.

Four different algae species were present in this year’s bloom. The two most dangerous produce powerful neurotoxins that accumulate in the marine food chain: Alexandrium catenella, which produces saxitoxin, and Pseudo-nitzschia australis, which produces domoic acid.

The toxins accumulate in filter-feeding fish, and then poison the larger mammals who eat them.

Scientists have known from the beginning that the fires didn’t initiate this year’s bloom. This is the fourth harmful algae bloom in as many years, and levels of toxin-producing species were rising before the Palisades and Eaton fires began. But the acceleration of marine wildlife deaths in the weeks after the fires led some to wonder whether L.A.’s disaster on land was also worsening the crisis in the sea.

However, based on the data available, fire pollution appears to have influenced the ocean’s chemistry far less than this year’s upwelling effect did.

“The only thing we could say is that [the fires] added some nutrients to an already nutrient-rich environment,” said Dave Bader, a marine biologist and the chief operations and education officer for the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro. Runoff from the fires added fewer nutrients over the course of the bloom than sewage treatment facilities did, he said.

Beginning in February, hundreds of dolphins and sea lions started washing up on California beaches, either dead or suffering from neurotoxin poisoning symptoms such as aggression, lethargy and seizures. A minke whale in Long Beach Harbor and a gray whale stranded on Huntington City Beach also succumbed to the outbreak. Scientists believe countless more animals died at sea before the outbreak abated in May.

The year’s bloom was the deadliest for marine mammals since a 2015-16 outbreak that killed thousands along the Pacific coast between Alaska and Baja California.

Similarly, this year’s outbreak stretched from Baja California in Mexico to Bodega Bay in Northern California. The sheer geographic extent of the damage suggests that L.A.’s fires played a minimal role, said Clarissa Anderson of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She directs the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System, or SCCOOS, which monitors algae blooms.

The only sign that L.A.’s waters could be unhealthier than other coastal stretches this year was an unusually high spike of Pseudo-nitzschia in March at the Santa Monica Pier, Anderson said. But even that wasn’t significantly higher than readings elsewhere along the coast.

Just as January’s firestorms occurred outside of Southern California’s typical fire season, this harmful algae overgrowth appeared earlier in the year than have previous blooms. As climate change has shifted the timing and intensity of the strong wind events that drive upwellings, “we’re coming into a future where we unfortunately have to expect we’ll see these events with recurring frequency,” Bader told Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in June. “The events that drove the fires are the events that drove the upwelling.”

The first cases of West Nile virus this year have been recorded in Los Angeles County, with four people hospitalized between July and August, officials said.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on Wednesday announced that patients from the Antelope Valley, San Fernando and central Los Angeles were infected with the virus, hospitalized and are now recovering.

“The first human cases of West Nile virus are an important reminder that we all need to take steps to prevent mosquito bites and mosquito breeding,” said Dr. Muntu Davis, L.A. County health officer, in a statement.

“Mosquitoes thrive in hot weather, increasing the risk of bites and mosquito-borne diseases.”

West Nile is spread by the bite of infected mosquitoes. Those who have contracted the virus may suffer from a variety of symptoms, including fever, headache, nausea, body aches and a mild skin rash.

The virus can attack the nervous system and lead to meningitis, encephalitis, paralysis and, in rare cases, even death.

Risk is acute in adults 50 years of age or older and for those with chronic health conditions.

It is believed the mosquitoes carrying the virus are in L.A. County, though not all are carriers, according to health officials.

Davis encouraged residents to use insect repellent, get rid of standing water around their homes and install or repair windows to reduce exposure to mosquitoes.

Environmental Protection Agency-registered sprays contain DEET, picaridin, IR3535, oil of lemon eucalyptus (OLE), para-menthane-diol (PMD), or 2-undecanone and are proven safe and effective, even for pregnant and breastfeeding women, according to health officials.

Also avoiding areas at dawn or dusk when mosquitoes congregate is key to avoid getting bitten.

An individual should consider wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants when venturing to an area known for mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes tend to lay eggs in places with standing water.

The health department recommends emptying and scrubbing places where water accumulates, including tires, buckets, pet bowls, planters and rain barrels.

Birdbaths and wading pools should be cleaned weekly, while pools should be cleaned and chlorinated regularly.

The health department said over the last five years, L.A. County (minus Pasadena and Long Beach, which report to their own agencies) has averaged about 56 West Nile virus cases per year. The number of infected people, however, is expected to be much higher since most impacted individuals suffer mild symptoms and don’t file a report with the county, according to the health department.

The Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District reported 132 cases last year, with Northridge (eight), Lake Balboa (seven) and Porter Ranch (seven) producing the most recorded infections. There were two deaths in the county and 12 in the state in 2024, according to state figures.

About three-quarters of reported cases in L.A. County have had severe disease and approximately 10% of patients with severe West Nile virus die from complications.

There is no specific treatment for West Nile virus disease and no vaccine to prevent infection.

“Detecting West Nile virus in our district is a reminder that this virus has been present in California — and right here in our community — for over 20 years,” Brenna Bates-Grubb, community outreach specialist for the Antelope Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District, said in a statement.

“It’s part of our local environment and continues to reappear year after year,” she added. “With the recent rains and more in the forecast, conditions are ideal for mosquitoes to breed.”