Energy Demand speaks to Richard Brent, bursar at St Faiths School in Cambridgeshire and Charlie Cochrane, IT project consultant at Joskos Solutions, to get an educational perspective on energy efficiency.

For many years, schools have had their budgets stretched in a myriad of imaginative ways. Securing the best staff, nailing funding for new facilities, keeping up to date with the latest technology and equipment on offer. Now, with energy prices on a seemingly permanent upward trajectory, a new concern has risen up the agenda: energy efficiency

With the EMA estimating that gas and electricity prices will double over the next five years, it’s easy to see why energy cost inflation will be such a problem – and why energy efficiency is now such a concern for many schools.

Richard Brent, bursar at St Faiths School in Cambridgeshire, has taken a holistic approach to energy saving, conducting two comprehensive audits of the school’s energy usage: a building survey and an energy audit.

The audits looked at every possible energy angle in each of the school’s 287 rooms, from double glazing, door closers, lighting and radiator valves to the room’s aspect and to the efficiency of the hand dryers and the tap aerators in the bathrooms. Then, with the help of an outside contractor, St Faiths drew up nine options to cut its energy costs and carbon footprint, and the potential return on investment of each.

“The catalyst was looking at our bills,” he tells Energy Demand, pointing to St Faiths’ annual electricity bill of £48,000 which had been due to rise 35% as a result of a fixed price contract coming to an end.

In addition, Brent began inspecting the school’s bills to check for accuracy. On finding some anomalies, St Faiths decided to invest in a dynamic monitoring system which monitors every meter in the school and delivers the data to a central system, allowing it to measure its energy use in real time.

“I’m now looking for daily anomalies,” he says. “If something happens to our energy use I can investigate, so not I’m not waiting for an invoice at end of month and finding that something’s gone wrong.”

The dynamic monitoring system has an additional benefit, in that the information about the school’s energy use can be shared in real time across the school. St Faiths now has information screens in nine different places within the building, which flash up energy usage information in a child-friendly dashboard style so everyone can see how much gas, electricity and carbon the school is using at any given moment – and crucially, how much it is costing.

“This shows the picture to everyone: this is what our energy use is, and it’s instantaneous,” says Brent. “You can make comparisons. It’s really good to show people that in winter we spend £300 on gas per day.”

One important aspect to come out of the audits was that the majority of the school’s energy costs were electricity related, and the majority of this was lighting. So, the school installed LED lighting and installed a new building management system, which has recently been optimised is already saving around £20 per day in one building.

Because the savings have been considerable, it has also been easy to continue investing, Brent says. So far, the school has spent in the region of £19,000 over four years retrofitting green initiatives, including an IT power management system and a solar photovolataic system for the sports hall, yet all this investment has been recouped already.

As  recently reported on Energy Demand St Faiths hopes to use the IT power management system, in this instance Dell Kace, to shave around 12% off its annual energy costs.

According to Charlie Cochrane of Joskos Solutions, an IT management consultancy specialising in the education sector and the company behind St Faiths’ adoption of IT power management, a pre-occupation with energy efficiency is becoming more and more apparent in the IT management work he does.

“It is something that has been growing over the last two years at quite a rate,” he says. “We’re finding that that they [Joskos’ educational clients] want to be able to control when those systems are running and make sure they are not running when not needed.”

Indeed, Cochrane claims that some of the schools he works with let their new found exuberance for energy efficiency run away with them.

“It is being thought about to the extent that probably some schools are replacing things with more energy efficient things that they probably could have waited a little longer for,” he says. “If they had waited, it may have had better savings for them.”

Power management for schools

So what does IT power management actually do, apart from turn computers on and off? For most of Cochrane’s clients, the key issue is to take a step-by-step approach to power management.

“The main focus is initially making sure that PCs and monitors are shutting down at the end of the day,” he says. “Then the next step looks at operation during the day: how often are those PCs running, can they go into standby mode when they’re not being used for lessons or in office?”

For St Faiths, the key concern is controlling the PC power in all the different environments within the school – which has to cater for a number of different needs at different times, from the classroom environment to library computers, to back-office needs such as the administration team, teachers’ own computers or the caretaker’s office.

Provisionally, says Brent, the computers are all programmed to shut down at the end of the day, and to shut down after being idle for a certain amount of time. However, crucially, the system for the school needed to be able to cater for exceptions in different environments – for example a classroom computer projecting an image onto a white board, which may need to be idle for some time, or a teacher working late.

Joskos also checks the associated peripherals such as the printers. In St Faiths’ case, the power management system uses energy saving plugs to ensure that they are turned off when not in use.  Meanwhile, the company also looks at the servers powering the entire system, the “back end” of operations, and see what efficiencies can be made here. Typically, servers run 24/7, but according to Cochrane, this is in fact where many of the efficiencies can be made, through so-called “virtualisation”. This works by scaling down the number of servers in use to do the same amount of work.

“All of the same services run but they’re using much less physical horsepower to actually do the work,” says Cochrane. “The energy savings are there because you’re running less physical equipment to get the same result.”

Behaviour change?

But, as all energy managers know, behaviour change is possibly the most critical factor in ensuring the best energy savings, and can be very problematic in large organisations populated by many people.

St Faiths has addressed this problem by putting coloured tags on all the plug points, indicating where they should be turned on or off by default, and by using its power management system to automatically turn off specific energy savings plugs attached to IT equipment that’s rarely turned off, such as monitors.

The dynamic monitoring system has helped, and the school has also sought to get the pupils involved in energy management, tasking them with making radiator heat reflectors out of cardboard boxes and turkey foil.  In addition, the school has put together an “eco committee” of teaching staff, parents, governors and pupils, in order to engage everyone in the process.

“The community of people that work and operate in this sort of environment are probably pretty clear on what the billing regime is at home, but sometimes when they come to school, it doesn’t matter too much if they’ve got the heating on, there’s an air con system running and they’ve got the window open,” says Brent. “It’s just alerting people to the fact that we can do a lot more with our money.”