Energy efficiency in the workplace: what can we learn from CRC best performers?

Love them or loathe them, league tables do have an alluring quality – even ones about energy efficiency.

When, in November last year, the Environment Agency published the first ever league table to rank companies and organisations according to their energy efficiency performance, the site couldn’t cope with the sheer weight of numbers trying to see who had come where. 

It is, of course, a pretty big league table – more than 2000 organisations have been ranked according to the measures they had taken on energy use as part of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), a mandatory scheme aimed at improving energy efficiency and cutting carbon emissions among large public and private sector organisations. The long list of participants include major supermarkets, utilities, airlines, hotels, football clubs, hospitals, Government departments and local authorities. 

The aim of the league table is to act as a reputational driver, incentivising organisations to measure and reduce their energy and carbon. Those in it, account for 10 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions. 

The league table has been both welcomed and criticised, with some even calling for it to be scrapped altogether. It’s certainly not perfect, but there’s a lot we can learn from it too. For one, it shows that 40 per cent of participants in the CRC have not yet taken steps to improve their energy efficiency. It also shines a light on those that have. 

Here we profile four very different types of businesses ranked in the top 50 and find out what we can learn from them about addressing energy efficiency. 

 
Manchester United Ltd
Manchester United is used to coming top of the league on the football pitch, so making it to the top of the league table on energy efficiency was perhaps to be expected. One of 20 companies ranked in the number one spot of the CRC Performance League Table, the world’s biggest football club can put much of its achievement down to preparation. 

Back in 2008, several years before the CRC came into being, the company made a 10 per cent carbon reduction commitment – and achieved a cost saving of £235,000 in just seven months.

Keith Maloney, of Maloney Associates, has been advising the football club on its environmental programme for five years. He says the real driving force for change at the club was not the CRC, but the rising cost of energy and the London 2012 Olympics. 

"Four years ago, energy doubled in price," he explains. "From a commercial point of view, it was about controlling that. But as a key organisation involved in the Olympics, we needed to be ahead of the legislation [on the environmental front] and a leader in the field."

Compared to some other CRC participants, Manchester United is something of a minnow in terms of its carbon emissions (8809 tonnes). Nevertheless, the club has one of the largest stadium’s in Europe, with a seating capacity of almost 77,000 and a significant catering operation, capable of producing 8,000 full meals a day. Other facilities include conference centres, a television broadcasting centre and training grounds. 

One of the factors behind the company’s leading position in the CRC league table has been the work it has done with regards to energy management, in particular installing around two dozen smart meters across all its sites. 

The company has also won accreditation from the Carbon Trust Standard, something it feels particularly proud of. According to the Carbon Trust auditor, the club has put in place a "model carbon reduction strategy’ (the club is currently awaiting confirmation of its second Carbon Trust Standard certification).

But most significantly, it’s the work the club has carried around engaging its employees that has given it the edge over many other CRC participants. 

"We highlighted a number of years ago – when we were going for energy efficiency accreditation – that there was a need to get staff on board," says Maloney. 

Manchester United employs 650 full-time staff. To date the employee engagement programme has focused on them, leading to the appointment of 23 'energy champions’ across the club and the introduction of initiatives such as the 'Board Room to Boot Room’ Energy Reduction Engagement and Staff Awareness programme and the 'United to Save Energy – You can make a Difference’ programme, which was launched by Sir Alex Ferguson.

Programmes such as these along with others, such as a lighting 'switch off’ programme, have helped the club save 3,300 tonnes of CO2 and over £630, 000 over the last three years. 

Of course, the hard work has yet to come, including training up Manchester United’s 12,000 part-time staff and taking decisions on renewable investment and a host of other things such as lighting improvements, says Maloney. 

 
The company’s objective is to reduce its carbon emissions by 20 per cent by July 2013.

"There’s still a lot to do," says Maloney.

Center Parcs
Chris Brooks, Center Parcs Sustainability manager, has one overriding pre-occupation when making any decisions about cutting energy usage and carbon emissions: "It cannot impact on the guests’ experience of Center Parcs," he says.

It’s a position that seems to have helped rather than hindered environmental progress at the British holiday parks group. The company, which welcomed 1.6 million visitors at its four villages last year, is ranked joint first in the CRC League table. 

Brooks credits the 'stick’ of the CRC for raising the profile of energy efficiency and sustainability internally at Center Parcs, but he says the group was already some way down the road of sustainability, having achieved the ISO14001 environmental management system some years ago. 

Of course Center Parcs villages, built deep within the forest, interact closely with the natural environment, so perhaps have a head start over others in connecting with the CRC’s aims. But as small towns, they also carry a sizeable carbon footprint – at last count the four villages emitted 63,117 tonnes of CO2. 

Center Parcs has committed to a carbon reduction target of 20 per cent by 2020 from a 2009-10 baseline. Last year, it achieved a 1.9 per cent reduction, but this year it is aiming for a four per cent cut. 

"It’s about understanding where the low-hanging fruit is," says Brooks about the group’s carbon reduction strategy. 

To do this, the company rolled out 200 smart meters across all its sites, including its head office, in late 2009. The automated metering has allowed Center Parcs to get a handle on the breakdown of energy use across the villages and, according to Brooks, has been an invaluable tool in the carbon reduction strategy. 

The main culprits in terms of energy usage are the parks’ swimming pools, so in 2010 the group committed over £1 million at the Whinfell Forest village to replace the boilers for the 'Sub Tropical Swimming Paradise’. This included the installation of four new efficient boilers and a combined heat and power unit.

At another site, the company has invested in LED lighting and automated kitchen extraction controls – producing energy savings of between 10 and 20 per cent. And the company is investing in a new building management system at one of its villages, which it will roll out to all three other villages if it tests well.

The group has £300,000 set aside for each village every year to spend on energy initiatives and Brooks says this linked with its staff engagement programme is reaping rewards.

"Every single person is bonused on the carbon emissions of the company," he explains. "It’s helped us develop a competitive instinct between the villages. Everyone thinks about carbon and everyone is rewarded for it."

Center Parcs’ biggest challenge now, says Brooks, is continuing to offer its guests new facilities and experiences, whilst reducing the group’s carbon footprint. The company is planning a fifth village in Bedfordshire, which will have 800 accommodation units plus a swimming pool. As such the new village is designed to the highest sustainable standards and will include a biomass-powered district heating system and solar panels.

"The new village will affect our absolute carbon emissions so this is one of the things I’m looking at very carefully. 

"We are number one [in the CRC League Table] and we have to make sure we stay there," he says.

The East of England Co-operative Society
The East of England Co-operative Society is ranked joint 44th – among the top two per cent – in the CRC Performance League Table, alongside the £13 billion turnover mutual, the Co-operative Group, and telecoms giant BT.

The significance of the ranking is not lost on the regional retailer’s energy manager Glyn Lee, who notes that Asda is the only one of the major supermarkets to have come above the Society, in 37th place (Morrisons is in 57th position, Tesco is ranked 93rd, while Sainsbury’s trails in 164th position).

According to CRC data, the East of England Co-operative emits 29,400 tonnes of CO2 a year. In 2010, it set a target to reduce its emissions by three per cent a year up to 2015, when the targets will be reviewed. Lee says those targets have been "smashed", but he admits he was "still pleasantly surprised by how high we were placed in the ranking". 

The East of England Co-operative Society can trace its roots back to 1861 in Colchester, has 200 trading outlets and employs 5000 staff. Before Lee joined the Society in 2007, no dedicated role existed with responsibility for energy and the Society’s annual energy bill topped £7 million. Contracts for energy supply were a mess and there were even instances where the business was being charged for electricity where buildings had been knocked down.

"The first thing I did was to consolidate our contracts," Lee explains. He also made sure separate cost elements on energy bills were visible wherever possible. "You can do something about visible costs."

The second move – and an "absolutely essential" one according to Lee – was to roll out smart meters. The programme began in 2008 and the Society now reads 99.4 per cent of its energy consumption through automatic meters.

"Smart meters don’t save you any money, but they point you in the direction of problems where you can save money," Lee says. "We’ve put night blinds in all our refrigeration throughout the food stores. From the half-hourly data I get from smart meters, I can see if a store forgets to put the night blinds down – I can check that every day across 136 stores."

The Society’s priority is always to reduce energy use first, but it has followed a programme of continual investment in energy efficient technologies, such as LED lighting in its refrigeration, heat recovery, air source heat pumps, power factor correction capacitors and inverter drives for electric motors.

Lee says the payback period for some of these investments has been as little as six months and – together with its energy saving measures – mean the Society’s annual energy bill has fallen to a budget of nearly £4.5 million in the last five years. 

Going forward the retailer is planning to invest in longer payback projects, such as renewable energy. It already buys all its electricity from green sources, but this year is planning to install a 50-kilowatt solar PV system at one of its sites. 

Another area the Society is planning to invest in is staff training. One of the reasons the company did not make it higher than 44th place in the CRC League Table was because it did not meet all the criteria for employee engagement, says Lee, something he wants to see changed.

Having come in the top two per cent of more than 2000 companies, the Society is keen to do everything it can to stay in a favourable position. 

BT Group
"We are fighting a war," says Richard Tarboton, director of Energy and Carbon Programme at BT, when describing the energy efficiency programme he’s overseeing across the telecommunications giant’s global business. 

BT, which made revenues of £20 billion last year and employs around 100,000 people, has an energy crisis on its hands. It emits a whopping 1.25 million tonnes of CO2 a year, making it one of the worst offenders for carbon emissions in the CRC. 

Across the ICT sector, bandwidth and data volume is growing rapidly. This is translating into a four to five per cent growth in energy usage for BT, equating to a hefty £250 million annual energy bill for the company.

Given the scale of the challenge, making it into the top two per cent of the CRC Performance League Table in joint 44th position, is no mean feat. It’s meant, among other things getting certified by the Carbon Trust Standard (for the second year running), engaging employees (around 55 per cent of the staff are currently engaged in saving energy, says Tarboton) and investing in a lot of new technology. But it’s also been about "going around and switching stuff off", as Tarboton puts it. 

The danger with energy is its easy for it to be invisible, so finding out where the energy is going is a key first step with any energy efficiency programme. Tarboton and his team were literally finding old parts of the network that – as customers migrated to new products and services –were not being switched off.

Tarboton’s got a three-point plan that he believes any company, whatever their size, should follow when it comes to reducing their energy usage. 

 
"Get in control of your data and capture the quick wins; second, get smart building control; and third, invest in equipment replacement."

He says those three actions should deliver a 10 per cent reduction each in energy usage – depending on the type of operation. 

Tarboton is still working through that plan at BT, but says the company managed a 2.5 per cent reduction in absolute carbon emissions in 2010-11 and a 3.5 per cent reduction in 2011-2012.

Going forward, the company is looking at a five per cent annual cut in carbon emissions and slashing its energy bills by £13 million a year. The cuts are being achieved through a major investment in smart energy systems across thousands of BT offices, telephone exchanges and data centres. That includes installing over 22,000 smart meters and over 15,000 energy management systems, across an estate covering 8000 buildings and 6000 sites. 

This expensive piece of kit (which has cost £17 million so far to rollout) tackles the biggest source of energy consumption for BT – the heating and cooling of its electronic equipment. Tarboton says the systems are delivering a 40 per cent reduction in air conditioning costs for the company. 

But sustaining that level of efficiency is the "difficult part", says Tarboton. In order to ensure the systems continue to perform to standard, BT is creating its own virtual 'energy control centre’, which will remotely connect all its sites via BT’s broadband network. 

"We are going to continue to innovate and find new ways through technologies, processes and people to take on reducing our energy," says Tarboton. "It will be a continuing challenge to reduce energy faster than we grow that is going to require more optimisation and more advanced control and equipment replacement with a longer term investment timeframe."

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