Reducing energy and water consumption and costs at UMIST

With a legal requirement under Part L of the Building Regulations and the forthcoming European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, the HE sector will need to embrace metering technology and begin to plan and implement improvements to their metering strategies, especially for new or refurbished buildings.

The benefits of metering technology are numerous, enabling:

- Identification of actual consumption, even for individual buildings
- Establishment of base loads & targets for improvement
- Identification of leaks through excessive consumption alarms
- Verification of bill payments.

One such university who is reaping benefits from metering in terms of cost and consumption reduction is UMIST, who’s energy manager, Chris Cunningham, has headed up the metering initiatives.

Appointed in 1997, Chris’s initial brief was to reduce energy costs by 10% over 3 years. Building on previous experiences, he quickly built a picture of the current metering system and the procedures for collecting and reporting data. It was quickly discovered that UMIST didn’t have much sub-metering; meters were old, some obsolete and the ability for remote reading was non-existent.

A strategic decision was made to invest in the metering infrastructure rather than higher expenditure on energy-efficient equipment itself, and between 1997 and 2002 UMIST invested circa £100,000 in:

- Upgrading almost all existing meters to code 5 pulsed meters
- Installation of new sub-meters to allow key consumption areas to be measured
- Development of a telemetry infrastructure
- Purchasing of sophisticated energy management software.

The new meter network, being constantly expanded, has meant that over the last 3 years:

- Electricity consumption has remained constant despite growth in estate size and student numbers
- Main gas supply (for heating/steam generation) has fallen from 41m kWh per annum in 99/00 to 35 million kWh in 02/03
- Water consumption has been steadily decreasing - 360,000 cuM to 310,000 cuM in 02/03.

The savings have been achieved through constant vigilance of building utility consumption, educating end users of their consumption patterns, sharing data with energy champions, reacting quickly in terms of maintenance and repairs to identified leaks, and monitoring evaluating the actual impact of new measures, so that adjustments can be made and – if necessary – investment plans can be changed

Download full case.

 

Go back