iBuilding will see the introduction of an ICT system to facilitate communication with staff and students as to the energy consumption of the UCLan campus. The system will be in the form of a dashboard that will share data with users, captured by automatic meter reading (AMR) equipment, and enable users to drill down to data at a building level. The dashboard will enable two way communication between Facilities Management (in particular the team responsible for Environment and Sustainability) and staff and students.

UCLan is committed itself to addressing the issue of sustainability within the University. It is a key focus of area of the Medium Term Strategy (MTS) 2007 – 2017, stating;, “We will be a model international University for sustainability. Our sustainability strategy will ensure that the University becomes a carbon-neutral institution within 20 years. We will also ensure that our students are educated for global citizenship by integrating sustainable development, health and well-being into our curricula”.

The Sustainable Development Strategy, which supports the MTS, outlines the principals UCLan aims to adhere to and the objectives its aims to achieve including;

• To fully meet or exceed standards set by local environmental legislation and advisory codes of practice having official status, in the countries in which the University operates.
• To address the root cause rather than to treat the symptom wherever possible; reducing the production of CO2 or waste now will have a far greater positive impact than planting trees or increasing the amount of waste recycled. Put another way, we will reduce when we can and offset when we can’t.
• To raise awareness about climate change and sustainable development.
• To be a role model and advocate for sustainable development.
• To the prudent use of natural resources and the prevention of pollution.To continuous improvement, through the setting of objectives and targets and by monitoring and review.

The objectives of the strategy, relevant to this call are;

• Implement an Environmental Management System (EMS)
  to gain ISO 14001certification or equivalent by 2010. [Which UCLan has successfully achieved and is one of less than 10 Universities to have done so].
• Reduce our carbon footprint by 25%
• Deploy the Carbon Management Plan, which was developed by UCLan in conjunction with Carbon Trust as part of their Higher Education Carbon Management Programme.
• Minimise energy usage.
  We will endeavour to purchase “green” electricity as part of our electricity supply contract.

UCLan has been very successful in implementing processes and making changes to support the sustainability. In relation to Greening ICT we have; implemented automated PC switch off, full virtualisation of test environments, converted servers to blades and virtualised them, introduced better recycling of books and journals, replaced network switches with more efficient models, created
UCLan Global to allow staff to work from remote locations and access the full University network, opted for e-journals over paper based journals, switched off old servers, introduced online application, enrolment and elective registration and created an e-bidding system for approving bids.

The numerous initiatives and projects undertaken across the university have gained UCLan;

• Further Education Green Lancashire Award in recognition of our integrated approach to implementing our Sustainable Development Strategy.
• 4th place in People & Planet's award winning Green League Table of Universities. Our improvement within the league from 5th (2008) to 4th place this year.
• A Highly Commended award for its Carbon Reduction in the Green Gown Awards .

Recently UCLan has installed automatic meter reading (AMR) equipment has been installed to all gas, electric and water meters. The AMRs initially has two purposes, to enable energy consumption to be monitored (every half an hour) so that exception reporting can be carried out and so that UCLan can gain credit on a league table due to be published in relation to the Carbon Reduction Commitment for voluntarily installing this equipment. UCLan has approximately: 30 water meters, 118 gas meters, 12 primary billing electricity meters and 23 electricity sub-meters. Installing sub-metering to meter end use energy helps:

• Identify where all the energy goes
• Provides a better perspective on building operation
• Identify where energy use is greatest
• To assess demand patterns and benchmarking
• Monitor patterns of energy use
• Reveal useful trends in out of hours energy use
• Spot things that go wrong before it’s too late
• Operators to understand and manage their building better
• Provide feedback to building operators on building performance
• Provide feedback on performance against targets
• Assist with aspects of tenant billing

UCLan currently uses energy monitoring and targeting software to log energy invoices and report on consumption. The concern UCLan has is that although the team responsible for environment and sustainability at UCLan use the data affectivity to identify where energy savings can be made, they are a small team within a large organisation and they will be limited with what they can achieve unless they get buy in from the rest of the UCLan staff and students. There have been numerous initiatives and campaigns that try to raise staff awareness of the carbon footprint UCLan is using, from ideas as simple as black balloons identifying the CO2 output of buildings and departments to a wide range of activities during CO2 Awareness week.

Through this project we aim to develop an energy dashboard to be displayed on all PCs within UCLan, to show in real time the energy usage of a building and provide information to staff and students on how they can reduce they energy they use as individuals.

Project Team

• Lucy Nelson - Project Manager
• Paul Morris - Director of Facilities Management
• Ruth Taylor - Energy & Carbon Management Officer
• LIS Web Services Team
• Ian Beddows - LIS Infrastructure Management Team