How to create 1 ton of C02 in a week

We’ve started to track the amount of miles we are covering in various parts of the business, starting with the sales team.  Over a week we wanted to understand how much C02 we are producing through business miles, and also consider the practicalities of the alternatives.

Our sales team passed back details on the miles covered over 5 days (names changed to protect the innocent).   Adding in the average C02 production per car per mile, the results of the weeks business miles are below.

 

So in all we generated almost a metric ton of C02 through our sales miles in a week, and not one of our most active weeks.  If we repeated the same experiment with our 30+ project team members, the results would clearly be proportionately worse.

Considering the alternatives, we need to understand some of the drivers (no pun intended) for using a car in the first place:

1) The need to meet the prospect face to face in order to develop a relationship – particularly when the competition is doing the same

2) Busy diaries mean more than one prospect meeting in a day, potentially in different parts of the country, requiring the convenience of a car

3) The cost of public transport (particularly inter-city during peak hours), adding in taxi’s at either end, can be astronomical

There are alternatives - we have tried web-demos in the past, and when meetings are booked in advance public transport can sometimes work, and be cheaper than booking at the last minute.  The challenge for me is more cultural.  We want to develop a long term relationship with our clients and this means a face to face meeting, particularly at the start of the process.  I’m not sure how many of our prospects would accept a telephone conference or a web demo, but then we don’t generally ask.  We pay a lot of money for our sales leads, and we want to do everything we can to close every potential opportunity.

We need to think about this one.  If we can’t completely take away the car, maybe we could consider the cars we drive (BTW I have a diesel 4×4, probably one of the worst), and perhaps incentivise people to drive cars with lower emissions.  But then I read that hybrid cars produce more C02 as part of the manufacturing process, and smaller city cars would not be appropriate for the amount of motorway miles we do.

Any thoughts?

Power problems with ageing kit

I heard somewhere that older equipment, even a couple of years old, can be significantly more power hungry than the current models.  I thought I would put this to the test in our office.

We have a number of large LCD screens in our meeting rooms that are used for software demonstrations, and these are often left switched on or left on standby, sometimes for days at a time.  One of the screens is around 3 years old, whereas the other are more recent, so these became the subjects for my test.

Using a power meeting I tested both screens on standby and full power to measure the wattage drawn.  The results ate below.

 

I was suprised to see the difference in two seemingly identical machines, with the older screen more than 50% less efficient on standby, and around 30% less efficient when switched on.  Obviously we should be taking care to switch these screens off when not in use, but this also suggests we should prioritise the replacement of older kit non-efficient kit. 

Office power consumption stats

We’ve been measuring our carbon emissions on a number of fronts and have some initial results in.  As we all at Armstrong like spreadsheets and graphs I have presented the results as such below…

First off we have office electricity usage, which we captured using the OWL device attached to the Harpenden office meter, which tells us at any one point in time how many KWh (Kilowatts used in an hour) we are consuming.  I have plotted the average usage over the working day below.

The pattern of usage appears to be in line with what you would expect, but at 6pm when the office is virtually empty I would have expected the power consumption to go right down, as opposed to around 75% of the peak consumption.

After a brief wander round the office, it appears that even with most of the PC’s switched off there is still a huge amount of power being consumed by printing and FAX kit on standby, LCD screens, lights, air conditioning etc. still in operation.   I think we need some more research to understand what contributes the most to our office power consumption.

And now for your ideas!

Come on Armstrong team, let’s be having your ideas on how we can reduce our carbon footprint.  Doesn’t matter how big or small, I’m open to your suggestions….. 

22 kW per hour – is that good?

I’ve now received the energy monitoring device and installed it on our 3 phase (I’m learning all the technical lingo) electricity supply in the office.  To do this I had to identify the 3 wires emerging from the meter and into the consumer unit (fuse box), and clip sensors which somehow pick up the energy being consumed, and send the data to a remote LCD display.

As of 3pm today the display is telling me we are consuming around 22kW of electricity per hour, which equates to 22kg of greenhouse gas per hour.  Now I need to check the electricty bill to make sure I am reading this correctly, and also that the calculation of carbon is as expected.

Suffice to say I have no idea if this is good or bad for a company of this size and type, with this many employees, but at least I can start to benchmark our relative performance as we attempt to reduce.  I will plot the usage over the next few days to see what we are doing hour by hour, and publish in a post early next week.

It’s great to start seeing how much we are currently using, already I’m actually looking forward to seeing how much we can reduce through some of the more basic energy saving techniques.  This afternoon we’ve been playing with the air conditioning in the offices, and managed to reduce the consumption by a couple of kWh, so I think is going to get people thinking….

Next step is to attach the individual power meters to some of our workstations, and to open up to the team here at Armstrong for ideas on reduction.

Getting some free advice!

I recieved an email last week inviting me to take part in a competition, where I would have the opportunity to present my business issue to a panel of experts, and benefit from their advice.  The competition closed that day, so I entered (in 500 words or less) my particular business issue, relating to reduction in carbon emissions.  Worth a punt I thought.

 The next day I received an email saying that my entry was successful!  I would be one of 4 entrants attending a soho studio session on the 1st April, where I would meet expert panel, and my issue and the subsequent advice be recorded.  On the day of filming I outlined my project to the panel, who were able to offer the following advice:

• Focus on equipment and the replacement strategy to ensure you are using the most energy efficient  IT kit
• Look at ways of reducing business travel, such as web demo’s and seminars, and record milage on a project by project basis
• Measure consumption before and after applying energy saving techniques to understand the impacts of small changes
• Engage staff in the exercise and get them excited about making the change

I was then set a specific challenge of creating a web blog recording the results of a 2 week experiment to try out some of the above techniques, and to ask staff to contribute to the blog with their feedback.  I was also given a video camera to make a video diary of our progress.  I may even be up for a prize if I am judged by the panel to have successfully followed the advice.

This has proved a great kick start to my project, and I’m looking forward to trying out some of the recommendations from the expert panel over the coming weeks, as well as including links to the video advice footage and my video diary.