Victoria mandated all-electric hospitals. It changes who is on site.

The Victorian Government requires all new homes, public buildings and hospitals to be all-electric in design from January 2024. All new State Government projects that had not reached the design stage must be all-electric.

That is a mandate, not a preference, and it applies to one of the largest social infrastructure pipelines in the country.

New Melton Hospital, a $1.1 billion availability PPP due to complete in December 2029, is being delivered all-electric with rooftop solar and electric vehicle charging. The Frankston Hospital redevelopment is all-electric on a retrofit basis, with its design expected to contribute to a 23 per cent reduction in energy usage across Peninsula Health sites and cut emissions by 4,084 tonnes a year.

For anyone who builds or services health infrastructure, the interesting question is not the carbon. It is what changes on site.

What actually comes out

A hospital is one of the most gas-dependent building types there is. Removing gas means replacing it in four places:

Heating and hot water. Gas boilers give way to heat pump plant. Different plant rooms, different footprints, different acoustic and vibration treatment, different maintenance regimes.

Sterilisation. Hospitals use steam for sterile services, historically raised by gas-fired boilers. Electrifying steam generation is the hardest single element of an all-electric hospital and is where the engineering effort concentrates.

Kitchens. Commercial catering moves to induction and electric, which changes exhaust, gas reticulation and services coordination.

Backup and resilience. Hospitals must maintain essential services through outages. Removing gas concentrates dependence on the electrical supply, which changes generator sizing, fuel storage, uninterruptible power supply design and the whole essential-services strategy.

What that means for the trade mix

The consequence is straightforward and commercially significant.

Electrical scope increases materially. Higher connected load, larger switchboards, more distribution, plus solar and EV charging infrastructure that did not previously exist on a hospital brief.

Mechanical services scope increases. Heat pumps, thermal storage and electric steam generation replace a boiler plant that was comparatively simple.

Gas fitting largely disappears from new public health work in Victoria.

Commissioning gets harder. Electrified plant with heat recovery and thermal storage has more interacting systems than a gas boiler and a chiller. On projects where commissioning already runs long, that adds to the tail.

For subcontractors, the practical point is that the electrical and mechanical packages on a Victorian hospital are now worth more, and require capability that not every health contractor has built.

The grid connection becomes a design constraint

This is the part that connects to the rest of the pipeline.

An all-electric hospital has a materially higher peak electrical demand than a gas-and-electric one. That demand has to be delivered — which means supply capacity, substation provision and a connection process that is under pressure nationally.

Securing a grid connection for a large new load in Sydney or Melbourne can take two to three years, with transmission projects queuing behind transformer lead times and substation upgrades. That is a data centre statistic, but the constraint is the same one.

On an all-electric hospital, the connection is on the critical path in a way it never was before. It is worth resolving at business case stage rather than discovering during design.

Does it pay?

The case being made is that it does. A staged rollout of hospital electrification has been estimated to reduce hospital energy costs by around $59 million annually once implemented.

Retrofits are already running. The Victorian Health Building Authority has removed gas infrastructure and installed solar at Lismore Community Health Centre and Macarthur Community Health Centre, both now operating without LPG. Feasibility study sites proposed include Williamstown Hospital and Echuca Regional Health.

Retrofit is the larger market. New hospitals are a handful of projects. Existing hospitals are hundreds of buildings, all with gas, all needing the same four replacements — and all having to stay operational while the work happens.

That is live-clinical brownfield services work, which is among the most constrained environments in Australian construction and among the least contested markets.

What to watch

1. Whether other states follow. Victoria has mandated it. New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia all have health pipelines and none has a comparable requirement.
2. How electric steam generation is resolved on the first completed all-electric hospitals. It is the hardest element and the one most likely to produce a repeatable solution.
3. Grid connection timeframes for large health loads, which are not currently reported separately from other large-load connections.
4. The retrofit program, which is where the volume of work sits.
5. Whether the $59 million annual saving estimate survives contact with delivered projects.

Published 1 September 2026 · Updated 7 September 2026