Energy Efficiency at Imperial – How Green Are We?

Imperial is a big organisation. Fifteen thousand students, six thousand members of staff, nine campus areas and a billion pound annual budget. By account of its sheer size, the College consumes a great deal of resources: energy, plastics, water, lavatory paper, and it all stacks up. Fortunately, Imperial’s commitment to reducing waste and increasing energy efficiency was enhanced in 2008 with a commitment to cut the College’s carbon emissions by 2014. We’ll learn early next year if we’ve hit the target, but the signs are promising.

Since 2008, we’ve reduced the amount of CO2 emitted from rubbish that would have been sent to landfill or incinerated from 798 tonnes to 266 through the excellent site-wide recycling programme. The 9MW gas-fired CHP plant under the Electrical Engineering building supplies electricity across the campus through Imperial’s own high-voltage network, and heats much of the water too. Output from the giant boiler is now closely adjusted to demand.

Better metering has also been rolled out across campuses, with site-wide data collated and presented in real-time.

Low-energy lighting and motion sensors are now considered for all building refurbishment work. The Business School, next to the City & Guilds building at the eastern entrance to the South Kensington campus, now has both installed, and similar upgrades have taken place in RSM, Huxley, RCS1, Electrical Engineering and Chemistry.

Refurbished Wilson House undergraduate residence now sports a solar array in addition to its new LED lighting.

Imperial have built energy efficiency, water conservation, recycling, continuous improvement, and all those other key elements that make an effective sustainability policy right into our organisation.

So all good, right? Well, not so fast. One of the things that makes Imperial so great, the decentralised, committee-based, consensus-driven culture means that there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit.

Much of the South Kensington campus does not even have LED lighting and motion sensors installed, a simple retrofit that substantially reduces energy consumption and often pays for itself in only a few years. The process of getting approvals can take literally years, in many cases nearly everyone in a department has to agree to a lighting re-fit that only takes a few days to complete.

A big leap to kick-start our College’s energy efficiency improvements would be a simple fast-tracking process for obvious long-term cost savings like LED and low-energy lighting retrofits. Responsibility also needs to be taken at a departmental level. Much of the energy-sucking specialist equipment many of us use in labs, even the humble extractor fan, can get left on (unused) for weeks on end.

All in all, it looks like college staff, the estates and facilities team have done a incredible job so far, and with a streamlined approval process, could do even better. And as the focus for development moves to Imperial’s West campus, let’s make sure we apply what we’ve learned from the great work at South Kensington.