Hospitals are among the most energy-intensive public buildings. They operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, relying on complex technical systems to maintain patient safety, indoor comfort, and uninterrupted healthcare services. In Albania, this challenge is compounded by the fact that a significant share of hospital infrastructure is aging, characterized by low energy performance, high operational costs, and a growing environmental footprint.
For addressing this challenge, the professionals responsible for managing the day-to-day energy use in these facilities need to have the knowledge, tools, and institutional backing to make those systems more efficient and that is precisely the gap that PEEB Cool set out to address.
Building a Roadmap for Albania’s Health Buildings
As part of the PEEB Cool programme, GIZ and AFD are working with the Albanian government to develop a Comprehensive Investment Sectoral Roadmap for Energy Efficiency in Albanian Hospitals. This roadmap is grounded in evidence: a national inventory of healthcare facilities was compiled, energy performance benchmarks were established, and walk-through audits are being conducted across representative hospitals to identify priority investment needs.
Using a hybrid Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework that integrates qualitative and quantitative criteria, nine Albanian hospitals have been prioritised for investment, spanning regional, municipal, university, psychiatric, and specialised national healthcare facilities.
To ensure the roadmap is implementable and there is a real uptake on the ground, we have worked in the development of a Training Manual for Hospital Energy Administrators along a Training Programme for the main actors involved and those who will ultimately be the doers of this energy paradigm shift.
Training Energy Administrators
On 13 March 2026, hospital energy administrators from across Albania gathered at the Ministry of Health and Social Protection in Tirana for a full-day training workshop to translate Albania’s new policy framework into real institutional capacity.
The event opened with welcome remarks from Bledar Doda, from the Ministry of Health and Social Protection and Orion Isjamaj, from the Agency for Energy Efficiency (AEE), signalling strong governmental ownership of the process. PEEB country officer Alkida Sini (GIZ) presented the programme alongside colleagues from AFD Mirela Mata, before Lorenc Malka walked participants through the methodology underpinning the sectoral roadmap.
The afternoon sessions moved from strategy to practice. Energy administrators worked directly with the monitoring tools and reporting formats developed for their use, explored the MCDA framework for investment prioritisation, and discussed the institutional roles and responsibilities that Albania’s new Law No. 37/2025 on the Energy Performance of Buildings now places upon them.
The Case for Capacity Building
Making hospitals more energy-efficient delivers benefits that extend well beyond energy bills. Cutting consumption in public healthcare facilities means saving public money, reducing exposure to energy supply risks, and lowering the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change without compromising patient care or comfort.
Albania’s National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) sets a clear direction: approximately 2–3% of public building stock must be renovated annually. Achieving that at scale requires not just finance and policy frameworks, but the human infrastructure to sustain change from within. Training energy administrators is fundamental to move from ambition to implementation.
PEEB Cool’s approach reflects this understanding. By combining investment support through AFD with institutional capacity building through GIZ, the programme works on both the supply and demand sides of the energy efficiency transition, ensuring that buildings are not only design or retrofitted efficiently, but properly managed for the long term.
The training in Tirana marks an important milestone and the next step will be the finalisation of the sectoral investment roadmap. As implementation moves forward, the energy administrators trained in Tirana will play a central role in monitoring performance, managing systems, and ensuring that efficiency gains are sustained over time.
Learn More and Get in Touch
You are invited to learn more about PEEB Cool’s work transforming the building sector across 11 countries on 4 continents: visit peeb.build/peebcool.
To learn more about PEEB’s work in Albania or to connect with the team on the ground, reach out to PEEB country officer Alkida Sini at GIZ Albania: info@peeb.build