ENFRA: Scaling Energy-as-a-Service
Working across the entire USA, ENFRA is developing secure, stable, reliable energy systems for healthcare and other industries, freeing up capital and delivering world-class service that allow infrastructure to thrive rather than drain. By scaling its Energy-as-a-service model, the company continues to grow its reputation as a trusted, long-term partner.
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“ENFRA is dedicated to empowering U.S. healthcare by scaling our Energy-as-a-Service solution as efficiently as possible.” That is how CEO Rob Guthrie describes the company’s entire strategy, and over the past 18 months ENFRA has backed the claim with six separate 30-year commitments to hospital systems across the country. It is an unusual way for an energy infrastructure firm to grow, betting its future not on a single flagship project but on convincing one health system after another to hand over their ageing boilers, chillers and electrical systems for three decades at a time. Behind that bet sits a business with the history to make good on it: founded in 1919, rebranded from Bernhard in 2025, and now employing more than 2,600 people across 28 locations nationwide.
The scale is real, but the pitch to healthcare CFOs is deliberately simple. Hospitals run their mechanical systems around the clock, carry some of the oldest infrastructure of any commercial sector, and are permanently short of capital to replace it, since every dollar spent on a chiller is a dollar not spent on a new ward or a piece of diagnostic equipment.
ENFRA’s Energy-as-a-Service model removes that trade-off entirely: the company designs, finances, builds and operates the infrastructure itself, typically over a 30-year term, guaranteeing energy savings and carrying the performance risk so the hospital never has to. That promise only holds up if the provider making it can genuinely deliver every stage of the work, and ENFRA’s breadth is what makes the guarantee credible rather than theoretical: mechanical and electrical construction, structural engineering, in-house fabrication, commissioning and long-term asset management all sit under the same roof, rather than being farmed out to subcontractors a hospital would otherwise have to vet and manage itself.
“ENFRA is on a mission to empower U.S. healthcare by offering and scaling our EaaS model as a compelling alternative to business-as-usual energy infrastructure practices,” Guthrie says, a line he has repeated at the signing of every major deal this year.
The first proof point came in Southern California. “Our EaaS partnership with PIH Health broadens our footprint in Southern California and gives us another excellent healthcare partner to serve and grow with over the next thirty years,” Guthrie said when the deal closed, framing it less as a single transaction than as the opening move in a broader campaign. “We congratulate the PIH Health team for their innovation and look forward to helping them accelerate core mission objectives in the years ahead.” Within months, that campaign found its biggest test yet in North Carolina, where Novant Health signed an $855 million EaaS agreement, among the largest of its kind anywhere in the country, funding HVAC, electrical and mechanical upgrades across the system while ENFRA guaranteed reduced utility consumption for up to 30 years. “Collaborating with Novant Health on this groundbreaking Energy-as-a-Service initiative is an exciting milestone for our team,” Guthrie said. “To partner with a system as large and innovative as Novant Health is a huge step forward in our mission. We could not be more thrilled to welcome them into our market-leading EaaS portfolio.”
THE HEALTHCARE PUSH
What followed was less a slowdown than an acceleration. Rochester Regional Health signed next, describing the partnership in terms that went beyond energy bills entirely. “Reducing our carbon footprint is a core priority for Rochester Regional Health, and this collaboration with ENFRA accelerates our progress significantly,” said Jennifer Eslinger, the health system’s President of Health Care Operations and Chief Operating Officer. “These improvements will not only reduce emissions but also create long-term operational efficiencies across our system.”
Baptist Health followed with a deal framed less around sustainability than around unlocking value the health system already owned but could not access. “Baptist Health’s leadership team recognized an opportunity to unlock intrinsic equity related to its existing energy infrastructure,” said ENFRA Executive Vice President Frank Ferramosca. “Through our Energy-as-a-Service model, we are empowering Baptist Health to modernize its facilities, reduce carbon emissions, realize material P&L benefits and, most importantly, redirect capital resources to advance the system’s mission.”
By the time Memorial Health signed on, the pattern was unmistakable: each deal slightly larger in scope than the last, each pitched around the same core promise of capital freed up rather than capital spent. “This partnership with Memorial Health is a strong example of how Energy-as-a-Service can unlock immediate capital, modernize critical infrastructure, and deliver long-term, guaranteed savings without adding balance sheet burden,” Ferramosca said, of an agreement that combined system-wide energy optimisation with on-site generation and a full central plant renewal. “By combining system-wide energy optimization with on-site generation and central plant renewal, we’re helping Memorial Health strengthen resiliency, improve operational efficiency, and reinvest in what matters most, delivering exceptional patient care.”
Beacon Health System closed out the run with perhaps the clearest statement yet of what ENFRA is actually selling: the removal of a burden. “This partnership allows Beacon to focus on exceptional patient care while ENFRA assumes responsibility for the infrastructure that powers it,” Ferramosca said. “By designing, financing, and operating these systems over the long term, we’re delivering reliable performance, measurable savings, and long-term resilience for these hospitals.”
Six health systems, six separate 30-year contracts, and the same story running underneath every one of them: capital preserved, risk transferred, mission protected. Each agreement was negotiated separately, with its own facilities teams, its own finance committees and its own set of ageing assets to account for, yet the shape of the deal barely changes from one hospital to the next. That consistency is deliberate and developed as part of a strategy that targets an industry that needs stability. A model that has to be reinvented for every client cannot scale the way ENFRA needs it to scale, and a 30-year guarantee only means something if the company standing behind it has proven, repeatedly, that it can deliver the same outcome regardless of which health system, which state, or which ageing central plant it inherits.
Hospital energy projects fail, when they fail, for the same predictable reasons: providers chasing the lowest bid skip commissioning or understate maintenance needs, projects funded purely through capital expenditure get delayed the moment budgets tighten, and facilities and finance teams that plan in silos end up with mismatched expectations neither side can fix after the contracts are signed. ENFRA’s answer has been to build every healthcare agreement around performance guarantees, integrated planning between finance and facilities, and ongoing measurement and verification from day one, closing off each failure point before it has the chance to open.
A MODEL PROVEN
The bet on healthcare is landing at a moment when the wider market is moving in exactly the same direction. The US Energy-as-a-Service market is projected to grow from around $19.45 billion in 2024 to $34.60 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate above 10%, pushed along by state-level clean energy mandates, tightening building performance standards and corporate sustainability commitments that show no sign of loosening.
Analysts who track the broader energy-efficiency services sector have long argued that commercial and industrial clients, not households, generate the overwhelming majority of the opportunity, precisely because their energy bills are larger, their appetite for long-term contracts is stronger, and their infrastructure decisions carry consequences that ripple far beyond a single utility bill. Renewable energy consulting now accounts for more than 30% of the entire US energy consulting market, a figure that would have looked implausible a decade ago, and commercial and industrial customers are expected to drive most of that growth, precisely the kind of large, complex, capital-constrained client that ENFRA has spent the past year proving it can serve at scale.
Six deals in 18 months is not, on its own, a market. But it is a pattern, and patterns are what get noticed. Every hospital system that signs with ENFRA becomes, in effect, a reference for the next one still weighing up whether to hand over three decades of infrastructure decisions to an outside partner. “We could not be more thrilled to welcome them into our market-leading EaaS portfolio,” Guthrie said of Novant Health, and the phrase could apply equally to any of the five systems that came before or after it. ENFRA is not simply participating in the growth of Energy-as-a-Service. It is trying to become the name healthcare boards reach for first, one 30-year signature at a time.