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WeSave - Community Buildings Carbon Management

You can monitor and manage your carbon emissions by using the WeSave tool, created by Marches Energy Agency – www.wesave.org.uk

 

Wesave.org.uk supplies you with the tools to perform your own energy audit through the wesave.org.uk interactive website, accompanied by its help screens and guide book. This process gives you ownership of your own carbon descent, increasing your involvement in the process and resulting in large impacts on your carbon descent. Wesave.org.uk then continues to interact with you, showing you how your energy consumption decreases over time and assisting you with any future changes.

 

1. About your building

The tool needs to know a bit of information about your building in order to help with the analysis and to configure the tool to ask the right questions further down the process. This information includes the following:

  • What fuels you use and what prices/tariffs you pay.

  • What type of building you have (e.g. office, shop, school etc) and information about the number of people in the building and its floor area. This information is used to compare energy use against a benchmark of other similar buildings and this can give an indication of what targets should be aimed for.

  • Information on sector and location. This is necessary to help provide more focussed guidance on grants and other assistance that may be available.

 

2. Taking and entering meter readings and fuel consumption

The start of any carbon reduction plan is to monitor actual energy consumption. The tool enables the user to enter fuel consumption for all fuels in use (gas, electricity, oil, LPG, coal) historically and on an ongoing basis. From this, a rolling carbon footprint is calculated that provides a continual record of progress along the carbon reduction trajectory. 

This carbon footprint is compared to sector benchmarks.

For electricity and each of the other fuel types, your consumption over time is displayed on a graph, if you choose to share your data, you can then compare your energy use against others, inspiring competition and further action.

 

 

3. Understanding and optimising lighting

Lighting is the easiest and therefore the first service to tackle. You will be led through the process of carrying out a lighting inventory, and entering the results in the tool. The workbook will explain all that is needed to identify what lighting is installed.

The tool then calculates what proportion of the total electricity use is consumed by lighting, and will advise on what alternative lighting could be used and the savings that would result.

 

4. Electrical equipment and appliances - measuring and recording

You will be led through the process of entering the items of electrical equipment that are in use and through the process of measuring the actual energy consumption for some of these items if necessary. This then is used to identify what the major users of electricity are and whether savings can be made in these areas.

 

5. Understanding your heating and hot water system

Details about the heating system in the building will be input, including the boiler or heat provider, and the heat distribution system.  Help in identifying types of heating system, and the efficiency of the boiler is provided both in the workbook and by the online help.

From this, potential improvements can be identified to the heating system., including the potential benefits from installing solar water heating.

 

6. Heat losses - where do your buildings leak most heat?

Information about the age, size and construction of the building is collected. The workbook provides help on collecting this information. From this data, the theoretical heat loss is calculated and this is used in identifying where the greatest heat losses are occurring. The tool can then suggest building fabric improvements that can be made and the estimated savings that would result.

 

7. Recording and analysing your transport use

For some transport has a significant contribution to your carbon footprint. If you wish to quantify your total transport use and set new targets for future use then the tool allows you to enter in your transport mileage and include this information in your total carbon footprint and targets.

 

8. Renewables - are solar photovoltaics, wind turbines or biomass heating systems feasible?

The tool will ask the user appropriate questions to identify whether any renewable energy solutions are appropriate for the location.  If so, the tool will help the user to evaluate what size of installation would be appropriate and the costs and savings that would result.

The tool makes us of third party software developed by Encraft for the calculation of yields and savings resulting from solar PV and wind turbines.

 

9. Developing and implementing an action plan

The tool will generate a report on the actions that can be made to reduce carbon, and therefore a carbon target can be set. This can then be turned into an action plan and this can be used to measure off achievements in working towards the target. This will be a useful representation of the specific benefits for a specific cost.

 

10. Record of actions taken

The tool allows you to record your progress; changes made are recorded as well as other historic information so that progress along a carbon reduction programme can be effectively monitored.

 

11. Measuring your progress

The tool contains a rolling measure of carbon emissions by gathering regular meter readings and other energy use and consumption. From this, a continual visual record is generated indicating progress towards the carbon target.

 

12. Sector specific advice on grants etc

The tool evaluates suitability for renewable technologies, and suggests building fabric improvements. Grants and financial assistance will often be available to help with these according to the sector and geographical location. The tool will flag up potential sources of assistance according to the sector and location.

 

 

The user will essentially get out what they put into the tool in terms of the level of detail and so it can serve as a very basic carbon foot-printing and benchmarking tool right through to facilitating a feasibility study into renewable energy measures at the most detailed level.