Archive for February, 2012

SAS UK Marlow Office, Results of Energy Reduction Project 2011

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

SAS UK has just completed their first year of Workplace Footprint Tracker (WFT) enabled energy management in their fabulous Marlow site. Their flagship building, Upper Wittington was the initial project focus.

SAS team begun with a well thought out approach setting up an energy management process for monthly reviews as well as investigations into how their building systems were functioning. The energy reduction project was initiated by corporate services and Suzanne Blois was appointed to manage the process.

In preparation, just over a year ago, twelve smart sub-meters where fitted to the largest building assets including chillers, ventilation, kitchen and supplies to the work-zones. This data was feed into the WFT.

The WFT showed up challenges with lighting controllers, space heating and ventilation. Some of these challenges were easy to rectify while others have proved more complex. Highlighting these challenges led to Building Management System reprogramming so that electricity demands could be optimized in addition to asset control plan development and alterations for other equipment settings.

The verifiable outcome has been an 8.5% saving in electricity consumption in last year – amounting to 101,000 kWh. This saving will be extended this year as a number of the identified challenges are continuing to be resolved.

This year SAS will focus on floor power and creating more employee energy awareness as well as heating and ventilation, and looking to further reduce ‘out of hours’ energy wastage. This will include encouraging employees through active communications and training to be aware of the need to save energy through switching off more equipment when they are not required.

Taking energy management to the desk

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Managing the energy from office desktop equipment is becoming increasingly important. According to the Carbon Trust office equipment accounts for 15% of energy use and is expected to reach 30% by 2020. To start looking at the office energy use is something every organisation should do. Especially considering that you can cut your office energy use by over 70% with little or no cost.

To make this possible you should use the following three strategies:

Optimise the use of your equipment

Make sure all equipment (pc’s, monitors, printers, desk lamps, phone chargers etc) is powered off during nights and weekends. All equipment consumes energy even in stand-by mode so make sure it is unplugged or powered off properly. This can be achieved with timers or energy-saving master/slave power sockets. Also make sure to use your printers in a more efficient way by printing in batches rather than one job at a time and to print double-sided and with lower resolution. Do also check that all desktop computers are have the power save option enabled to reduce energy wasted when computers are not in use.

Phase out energy guzzlers in your office

When you buy new equipment think about switching to laptops since they use only around 10% of the energy of a standard PC. And when upgrading your monitors consider buying OLED screens since they require 40% less power than their LCD equivalent. Also to consider when buying new computers is whether you really need the fastest processors, biggest monitors, heavyweight software packages or the most powerful sound or graphics cards.

Measure, monitor and visualize.

The importance of measuring and visualising energy use cannot be stressed too often. As put in this article “Visualization of energy and climate performance is an indispensable prerequisite to effective energy management”. With online tools like The Workplace Footprint Tracker the effect of energy savings initiatives can be monitored and followed up, awareness can be increased around the issue of saving energy and staff can be motivated to take simple energy saving measures.

We in Building Sustainability have great experience in the field of energy reduction in the workplace and would be more than happy to discuss with you how your organisation could achieve energy savings in your office. Signup to receive updates on our products, events and news by clicking here.