Yesterday our team joined a London Universities Environmental Group (LUEG) meeting to talk about various ways to reduce our carbon emissions. LUEG meetings offer a great opportunity to share best practice with sustainability practitioners at other universities in London, as we all work on similar issues. One of those issues is energy use. With more than 25,000 students and 6,000 staff, the College spends about £10 million on energy per year! We listened to a presentation by DemandLogic, a company that works for King’s to identify energy efficiency problems in our estates by getting data from building management systems into ‘the cloud’. Or as Joe of DemandLogic described it, this is where the “hardcore industrial world meets internet geeks”.
The DemandLogic system shows how the building management system is performing.
Controlling buildings better can save a lot of energy and reduce emissions. The Carbon Trust estimated that UK businesses and public bodies could reduce 2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions by encouraging more sustainable behaviours from employees, which could save a shocking £500 million! Since DemandLogic started to work with King’s a year ago we’ve saved 2500 tonnes of carbon. Overall it is estimated the project identified savings worth approximately £390,000.
