Savings plan
Trying to be green and keeping a healthy profit margin needn’t be mutually exclusive goals. By investing in simple energy saving measures you can save money and help the environment in one fell swoop
by Lee Jones
With the prospect of a worldwide recession, soaring overheads and a multitude of other industrial and market pressures, you’d be forgiven for pushing thoughts of how your organisation might be affected by climate change to the back of your mind. Climate change is widely accepted as being one of the most pressing challenges facing the world today and leading scientists agree that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are almost certainly contributing to an increase in global temperatures.
- The application of simple £20 seven-day timers to your photocopier, programmed to switch off outside working hours can save approximately £80 a year
- Check the time-clocks on your outside lights to ensure they match lighting up times, one hour’s difference could be costing you as much as £20 a day
- If you have a building management system check the time schedules match staff occupation times, ensuring plant is off when the building is empty. Also that the bank holidays have been accounted for as this can save you some 193 hours a year in equipment run times
- The application of the same simple £20 seven-day timers to your vending machine, programmed to switch off outside working hours saves approximately £100 a year
- Turning off your computer at the end of the day instead of leaving it on standby overnight can save you approximately £50 a year
- Up to 70 per cent of heat from radiators can be lost through the outside walls, so install simple reflective radiator panels behind them
- Stay late one night to see how many PCs, lights and items of plant are left on — then take action to curtail the practice
- Check your building availability charge on your electricity bill against your maximum demand for the past 12 months and, if you can reduce it, one phone call could save you thousands of pounds
- ‘Switch off’ campaigns work, but for a limited time, so be creative and place posters on the backs of toilet doors and over urinals — people are more likely to remember them in unusual places
- Where possible apply fixed temperature dead bands (19-22 ºC) to air conditioning and comfort cooling systems to prevent staff making wild adjustments, this can save you as much as 10 per cent over the year
There is a global drive to reduce greenhouse emissions through commitments like the Kyoto Treaty, under which targets of a 12.5 per cent reduction must be achieved by between 2008 and 2012. The UK government, in its energy white paper, wants to achieve a 20 per cent reduction by 2010, increasing to a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. We now know that commercial buildings contribute up to a staggering 50 per cent of the UK’s total emissions, meaning significant improvements in energy efficiency to the current commercial building stock are required in order to come anywhere near those targets.
In the current turbulent economic climate, the need for businesses and facilities managers to be green — and all the time and investment that requires — conflicts with the pressure of trying to do what you can to keep your head above water. But the two pressures — trying to be green and keeping a healthy profit margin — needn’t be mutually exclusive goals and by investing in energy saving measures, some of which cost next to nothing, you can actually save yourself money and help the environment in one fell swoop.
The first thing to understand in any energy management programme is how much energy you are using and, more importantly, how it is being used, something in its basic form that can be obtained from data made available from your utilities provider. Next move would be to compare your building against best practice benchmarks, freely available from the Carbon Trust or Bsria, as this provides some form of indication of potential savings and your performance. In the longer term permanently-installed monitoring and targeting applications will provide real-time performance data, alarms and reports ideally though a web interface giving you wide and immediate access to data, enabling you to maintain good practice. Importantly, data from these web systems can also be used to help with a building’s energy performance certification, ISO 14001 accreditation and corporate social responsibility reporting, all vital elements in today’s business world.
It’s rare that a building is occupied 24 hours a day, seven days a week, yet if you looked at a seven-day profile of your utilities usage, you’d probably find you were using varying levels of energy even though the building was empty. Your first step, therefore, is to ensure there is no unnecessary consumption during those hours when the building is empty and ask yourself what is being left on.
Most new buildings now come with motor controls as standard in the form of variable speed drive on pumps and fan motors, but don’t panic if you occupy an older building because these can be easily and cheaply retro-fitted to generate energy saving of 20-40 per cent with a typical return on investment of under 18-24 months. In many areas of a building the lighting is constantly on even if it isn’t required. By fitting a simple mix of light level sensors and presence detectors you can ensure that the lights only come when required and generate energy savings of 10-20 per cent with a typical return on investment of under 12 months. In addition, retro-fit controllers are available for all non-electronic ballast lighting which offer savings of 30 per cent and are suitable for a wide and varied range of lamps. In other words: turning the power down. This can achieve energy reduction savings of between 10 and 20 per cent without impacting on a building’s performance. The technology takes advantage of the fact that a building’s electrical equipment is rated 10 per cent less than the UK’s nominal supply voltage. By reducing the voltage, and at the same time improving the balance of the phase supply to motors and suppress some of the harmonics in a circuit, you will produce substantial power savings and reduce both costs and carbon emissions. Not only that, it will also extend the operating life of equipment designed to run at lower voltages.
A wide range of renewable energy sources are now becoming more obtainable, such as wind, but many of these still have a way to go in terms of variable return on investment, unless you can obtain grants or external funding, but these do offer very green low carbon technologies, however we are currently seeing some good results and positive returns on investment with solar water heating and ground source heat pumps.
Lee Jones is CSR manager for facilities maintenance company Integral UK
