Objective 5: Rapidly reduce GHG emissions through technology solutions

Objective 6: Implementing net zero carbon capital development

Core to our CECAP is reducing our emissions by 50% by 2030/31 against our 2018/19 baseline. Achieving this includes implementing projects across all activities which reduce our emissions. This requires renewable energy and water technologies, optimising building energy and water use, and moving from gas to electricity for heat and hot water.

The CECAP is embedded into our Estates Development planning and budgets. This enabled us to continue investing in technology to reduce our GHG emissions and make plans for further decarbonisation over the period to 2025 with a £1.25m investment planned.

New solar PV array for Jurassic House

Jurassic House is home to our data centre on Talbot Campus. In December 2021, it became the 7th building of ours to have solar panels installed. The new system is expected to save over 5 tonnes of CO2e each year, equivalent to two return flights to New York from the UK. You can read more about this here.

UPS upgrades

Working with our IT Team we have replaced the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) systems within all the IT Comms rooms with new more efficient units. These have been sized to meet the needs of each area ensuring that these are operating at the most optimum efficiency. As a result, the efficiency of these systems has increased from 87% to 98% creating estimated reductions of 100,000 kWh and 26 tCO2e per year.

Replacement high voltage transformers with ultra-low loss transformers

Following a review of the services infrastructure it was identified that the current tier 1 high voltage transformers were circa 32-47 years old. They had significant energy losses which accounted for 7% of the power consumed on Talbot Campus. We replaced three transformers this year with new tier 3 high efficiency, ultra-low loss transformers which also have a new Midel biodegradable oil. Tier 3 level transformers go beyond the minimum standard of Tier 2 required under regulations. The new units also reduce the risk in failure which would have a significant impact on operations should the existing ones failed. The reductions in energy and carbon are being measured over the coming years and could be as much as 26 tCO2e per year.

Continued to replace lighting with LED low energy lighting

It is now a standard procedure to replace any relevant lighting with LED low energy lighting. Over the year, we installed 60 LED light fittings in Dorset House and 900 in Weymouth House. This is estimated to save around 15 tCO2e per year and approximately 35,000kWh.

Sustainable IT

Current data suggests BU data centres are responsible for 10% of our total electricity use. Data from 2020/21 showed the data centre in Jurassic House used 618,607kWh and in Studland House, 261,373kWh. In our baseline year (201819), it constituted 9% of our total use, but this proportion has increased due to extra demand placed on data centres with increased home working.

The Sustainable IT working group have been meeting bi-monthly to address sustainable IT issues and support delivery of the Sustainable IT Policy. This has resulted in new objective being set by Director of IT to achieve a 15% reduction in power consumption of IT equipment in data centres and comms rooms each year.

To achieve this aim, in 2022/23 they plan to replace some data centre equipment that will consume around 50% less power, supported by an estates project in 2023/24 to improve the cooling and heating of the data centres to reduce energy consumption. Energy data from the metering system will be used to track the improvements.

All IT users are encouraged to follow the Sustainable IT Policy including switching off monitor screens and ensuring IT equipment goes into standby mode when not in use.

BREEAM ‘Excellent’ for our Phase 2 refurbishment of Studland House

Our Sustainable Construction Policy guides our capital development programme. It requires us to achieve BREEAM Very Good status for refurbishments and this year we completed the refurbishment of Studland House, a staff building in the centre of Bournemouth at our Lansdowne Campus. We are proud to say we exceeded our standards and achieved an ‘Excellent’ BREEAM rating with a score of 72.9%. We are focused on making the best of all our buildings and this means creating spaces which our staff love working in while reducing their environmental impact. Work on this project was nominated as a finalist in the South Coast Property Awards 2022 in the ‘Sustainable Development of the Year’ category.

CECAP actions addressed:

RE1.1, EB1.1, EB1.2, EB1.8, IT1.3

Passive carbon cooling trial for comms room

Working with IT Services BU are trialling a passive cooling system in the comms room of Weymouth House. The system is designed to utilise outside air to cool the space minimising the need for cooling via air conditioning. Initial savings from portable metering show that the reduction in energy was 95%. Additional benefits beyond energy reductions are the reduced maintenance requirements related to air conditioning. Monitoring for this trial is continuing and further opportunities for more comms rooms is being investigated. These will look at options to use outside air to cool or to recover this heat and reuse it within the building.

Lower emission bus refresh

Our UNIBUS service, operated by MoreBus, has seen a return to high levels of usage as a main source of transport for students and staff. Patronage data shows that bus occupancy is back to around 80% of pre-pandemic levels across all UNIBUS services with some routes delivering record numbers of passengers to BU. Local changes to routes and operators also mean that UNIBUS passholders have gained access to additional routes within their pass.

As part of the UNIBUS fleet refresh in 2021/22, we are rolling out new Euro 6 buses that are fitted with stop/ start technology as standard. These will be operational in September 2022 and will reduce CO2 emissions per litre of fuel by 2.62 kg with an increase of 0.38 miles to the gallon. This is estimated to save around 20 tonnes of CO2 per year (based on estimated milage of 264,245 miles as travelled in 2021/22). The new businesses will also reduce gaseous, noise or vibration emissions at bus stops.

The new buses will also be branded to share the impacts which BU has on the world around us showing our aim for a more sustainable, inclusive and healthy society. Watch our videos here to learn more about our story.

Energy crisis work

During the early part of 2022 the Russian invasion of the Ukraine escalated the global energy crisis resulting in repercussions for every business and household in the UK. Over the summer of 2022 we commenced work to identify new ways to further reduce our energy consumption. This included close working with maintenance teams and our IT department to plan and implement several new projects. Initial work has included improvements to lighting controls of Bournemouth Gateway Building to reduce the amount of energy consumed whilst maintaining 24-hour access for students and further tightening our controls across all buildings to avoid wasting energy. This included adding more time clocks and controls into our Building Management System and close alignment with opening hours maintaining ventilation and temperature without wasting energy. Covid-19 continued to impact energy usage as more ventilation (and therefore often heating) is required for safety and the Estates Team monitored and managed the impact on electricity and gas consumption.

Case study: Digital signage energy reduction

Our work this year included an energy review of running digital marketing screens around campus to identify wasted energy. As a result, a new Digital Signage Policy has been implemented to reduce the operation of the 82 screens only to core hours when the buildings are in use.

Our Marketing & Communications team analysed the potential carbon emission saving as a result of this change. Before the changes all devices operate between 7am -11pm (16 hours per day) and the changes reduced this by 5 hours per day. Additionally, the signage network will be on standby at weekends unless being used for an event, further contributing to cost and energy savings for BU.

This change is expected to see the daily carbon emission figures drop to 20kg CO2e per day (from 30kgCO2e) and 8,649kgCO2e (from 11,118kgCO2e), saving the equivalent of 38 iPhone 14’s emissions during their lifetimes, per year.

Developing our Heat Decarbonisation Plan

We were very pleased to be awarded nearly £99,300 in Low Carbon Skills Funding from the UK government to develop a Heat Decarbonisation Plan for 21 buildings across Talbot Campus, Chapel Gate, Lansdowne campus and Yeovil. This funding will enable us to carry out building assessments to identify opportunities to transition our buildings to low carbon or renewable heating sources. We will take a whole building approach, looking at opportunities to reduce the amount of heating needed by improving the thermal performance of our buildings. This will include using thermal imagery techniques to understand where heat loss is occurring.

Website carbon footprint

According to the Eco-Friendly web alliance the average website produces 2-2.5 grams of carbon for every visit: this can be reduced to around one gram per visit by adopting easy practices.

This year we held a joint event as part of Climate Action Month with Eco Friendly web alliance to support students and staff to learn about website carbon footprints. This supported students and staff to reduce the carbon footprint of their own websites and raised awareness of what large organisations can do to reduce this largely unseen emissions source.

Some of the key lessons learnt include minimising large videos, photos, Java Scripts and heavy website themes or frameworks. Our Marketing & Communications team reviewed these for our own website and agreed to:

• Provide advice to editors on good practice for using imagery

• Embed sustainability principles when developing digital projects in the short term

• Adopt sustainable procurement principles in the BU website rebuild project with our partners in 2022/23 and consider sustainability impacts in our design and build decisions.

Technology plans for 2022/23 More Solar PV array

In 2022 we have been installing a new solar PV array onto the roof of our Poole House building on Talbot Campus. This will be our 10th array and includes 236 new solar panels. These will generate an estimated 100,000kWh per year depending on the conditions. The energy produced by the new PV system is expected to save approximately 23 tCO2e. This means we will have over 700 solar panels feeding renewable electricity into Poole House, so in the summer this could be enough to cover the baseload. We expect the new solar panels to be ready in early 2023.

We are preparing plans to add new solar panels onto the roof of Dorset House and expect to spend around £100,000 on this new system to be ready by the end of 2023. This is part of our continued plan to add more sources of renewable energy on campus to achieve 10% of electricity from onsite renewables by 2025 (up from 5% in 2020).

New active travel facilities with solar thermal hot water

In 2022/23 we will be installing a new active travel facility at Talbot Campus on the ground floor of Poole House. This is part of our commitment to encourage people to cycle and walk to university to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from commuting. The new facilities will include space for changing, lockers and showers which will be partly powered by solar thermal energy funded by the CECAP capital fund.

Roll out of electric vehicle chargers on campus

We have purchased 25 electric vehicle charging points for our staff, students and visitors to use and plan to install these across our estate during 2022/23. These will be 7-11kW chargers and are aiming to support the transition to electric vehicles. They will be in addition to the BCP council rapid charger already located at Talbot Campus which is open to the public and are in addition to our BU chargers which support our own electric fleet vehicles.

Heat decarbonisation of Talbot Campus

We are developing our heat decarbonisation plan and have developed the first phase of activity which is likely to include the removal of end-of-life gas boilers and replacement with low carbon energy sources. We have produced plans for switching to air source heat pumps for three of our buildings on Talbot Campus and expect this to stop us using over one million kWh of gas per year from 2023-24. We will also be increasing our solar PV to progress towards our target of 1MW peak solar electricity by 2025.

Continued energy conservation projects

We have a rolling programme of installation of energy conservation measures including replacing lighting with LEDs, with the focus on areas across the Talbot Campus such as circulation, storage and service areas and on the Lansdowne Campus replacement of lighting in the underground carpark area in Studland House. We also plan to look for more opportunities to move to passive cooling approaches rather than energy intensive air conditioning systems. This is building on our trial installation of a free cooling system in the Weymouth House comms room this year.

Intelligent campus

Our research this year showed that we already have much of the foundation of an intelligent campus with our Building Management System enabling us to closely control HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) equipment remotely. This year we have progressed investigating how we can use sensor technology to better understand campus utilisation and enable closer energy management of our buildings. In 2022/23 we will be identifying trial buildings and developing businesses cases to form our approach to intelligent campus. This extends our central focus on using data to drive sustainability.

CECAP actions addressed:

TR1.3, TR2.3, EB2.4, EB2.1, EB4.2, EB5.1, RE1.1, IT1.2