Sainsbury’s plans to check out from its Holborn head offices and move to a more eco-friendly spot in King’s Cross, which it reckons will chop carbon emissions by up to 40%.
It’s still some time away, sadly, as relocation is only due in 2011, but good news nonetheless. Details remain sketchy, with talk of plans to use “renewable energy technologies”, “energy efficient building designs” and so on. This from the firm’s release:
The development will also include roof-mounted wind turbines, photovoltaics (solar cell technology), ground source heat pumps and solar thermal systems for generating hot water.
2 Comments
Rodney Higgins
Martin’s point there has not been overlooked. A large number of these screens are already in use and there is no additional load when they are used to additionally display this solution. Where there is another screen used the carbon dioxide emissions can be mitigated against such that each solution is effectively carbon neutral.
What is of far more importance though is the message.
We hope through displaying the good work being done with CO2 reduction that further savings will be generated. This could be either the client themselves, their staff becoming encouraged to contribute or through other companies realising they too need to display their environmental credentials to be taken seriously as a green company.
When this last change occurs we then have another organisation working harder to reduce their energy usage and CO2 emissions. This then leads to further organisations working in the same way etc.
The theoretical message cost is therefore far less than the benefits that would come from it and the more people that see this message then the more people will begin to work to counter climate change.
It is effectively an ever increasing circle.
If we can play even a small part in generating greater impetus towards reducing CO2 emissions then we will have done something positive.
Rodney Higgins, Commercial Director VSR2 Limited
Martin Bromley
Something may seem a little ironic about powering a large display to demonstrate the savings from powering down equipment… but I guess it’s the overall effect that matters, and publicising energy waste and progress that has been made to reduce that waste is undoubtedly important, provided the net result is energy savings.
Most organizations would benefit hugely by paying closer attention to their energy consumption patterns. So many buildings these days have interval metering that actually measures energy consumption every 15 or 30 minutes, and yet so many of those buildings fail to do anything with the data that’s available to them. Analyzing such energy data on a regular basis is tremendously valuable for finding routine waste, for checking that things are being powered down when they should be, and for tracking and proving progress that has been made.
I should probably admit that I am wholly biased, as I work for a company that makes a software package called Energy Lens (http://www.energylens.com/) for easy analysis of energy data in Excel. But it’s undeniably true that small changes in large buildings can result in huge energy savings, and finding the waste and tracking the improvements are critical steps in making those savings.
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