We’ve been working to cut our buildings' energy use for several years now and we’ve managed to cut it by 11 million kWh. That’s enough energy to supply the whole of the UK agriculture sector in electricity for one day . This saves us around £0.8 million annually in energy bills.
But it’s still important for us to continue to be as efficient as possible and reduce the amount of energy we use as we go about our work.
All of the energy we buy to use in our buildings is supplied by a green tariff, meaning it is generated from renewable sources by our supplier. Some of the buildings where we are tenants and do not buy the electricity do not have green tariffs. We are working with our landlords to get them to supply green tariff electricity. Despite this, around 95 per cent of our total energy supply (including our landlord owned sites) is 95 per cent green tariff.
How have we done it?
We have completed lots of projects across our buildings to reduce our energy use. For example…
- We audited our sites to see where we could do the simple things like insulating the buildings and checking the times boilers come on, then we did them.
- We set a policy that none of our buildings will be heated to more than 19C or cooled to lower than 26C, then we applied it consistently.
- We’re installed voltage optimisation across 44 of our buildings. This technology reduces the incoming voltage to the building from 240v to 220v. As a result, this has reduced emissions and energy bills by around 10 per cent at each site.
- We’ve installed the most efficient lighting and put intelligent controls on it so that they only come on when there are people in the room and there is not enough light from outside.
- We’ve taken innovative ideas from our staff to generate our own power from renewable sources such as at our Maerdy Hatchery site
- We’ve rolled out automatic meter reading to our building managers, so they can monitor the energy use of their buildings in real time.
What next?
We’re trialing the use of external LED lighting at a number of sites, to reduce our lighting footprint. We will continue to invest in our properties to make them more energy efficient. We will also continue to ask our staff for their ideas on how we can cut down on our energy use.
