UWE Bristol expects to build on its 11th-place ranking in the ‘green league’ of UK universities with a major drive to cut carbon emissions and slash energy costs.
Solar panel arrays installed at its Frenchay Campus are already paying off through cheaper bills and in future will begin to earn money for the university to invest in further green initiatives.
UWE Bristol sits one place outside the top 10 in the Green League, the independent ranking of UK universities’ environmental and ethical performance.
But it believes the solar photovoltaic (PV) panels it has installed on the roofs of its Centre for Sport and Department of Planning and Architecture, along with a range of other initiatives, will help improve this ranking.
The university is on track to achieve its aim of halving its buildings’ carbon emissions by 2021 from 2001 levels. It has already been awarded the Carbon Trust Standard for improving its carbon efficiency.
UWE brought in Solarsense, the region’s leading renewable energy specialists, to install a 50kW array of solar panels on the Centre for Sport – where the Kenyan Olympic team has been training for London 2012.
The company also fitted a 32kW array on the nearby Planning and Architecture building R2, alongside a solar PV array they installed five years ago on building R1.
Designed to generate about 74,000 kilowatt hours of clean electricity a year, the new arrays will save almost 39 tonnes of carbon dioxide, produced by burning fossil fuels, from being pumped into the atmosphere a year.
The systems will also benefit from Feed-in Tariff subsidies that will enable UWE to recover the capital investment in less than eight years as well as providing future income to invest in more energy-saving projects.
The university is already working on just such a project in the form of a massive programme to replace conventional lights with low-energy LED lamps. It has fitted LED lamps in external lighting across most of the Frenchay Campus and has now begun installing them in all its 33,000 rooms, including 2,200 student flats.
Students are doing their bit to save energy: a student ‘switch-off’ campaign has cut energy use by 13% overall since 2008, around a fifth of students sign up as Power Rangers and the halls of residence compete against each other to shrink energy usage.
Academic and support staff are ensuring equipment and lights are only used when necessary, including switching off equipment left on stand-by but still consuming up to 80% of the electricity normally used.
UWE’s estates operations manager Phil Kearns said: “We are using the new solar arrays to demonstrate the effectiveness of solar PV. If it proves as successful as we expect, we will be asking the UWE executive board to invest in more PV arrays.”
Richard Harris of Solarsense said: “Installing solar PV panels makes sense three times over for UWE by helping it achieve its goal of halving its carbon emissions, saving on energy costs and producing a good return on its investment.”
Pictured: Jane Crook and Steve Lock from UWE’s Centre for Sport with Richard Harris of installer Solarsense (right) on the centre's roof
