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Heat is harvested from Sanctuary's award-winning data centre
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The heat harvesting plant at Sanctuary's Worcester office
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How big is Sanctuary Group?
Sanctuary is one of the UK’s largest providers of affordable housing, care and management services. We own or manage over 79,000 units of accommodation, including student and key worker accommodation, registered care homes, supported housing schemes and general needs housing. We are an exempt charity and employ over 7,000 people based in locations throughout England and Scotland.
How do you feel about the Carbon Reduction Commitment?
We support the government’s commitment to take action on climate change and welcome initiatives that assist organisations in reducing their carbon footprint. However, careful consideration needs to be given to the impact and operation of any schemes and appropriate support provided. Clear guidance is also essential to help businesses to prepare.
How has your strategy towards the CRC changed since the ‘simplification’ announced in the spending review?
Our strategy hasn’t really changed. The CRC is not a key driver in our approach to sustainability; it is already an integral part of our business planning processes. We accept however that this may not be true for all businesses. The simplification of the CRC has had the effect of reducing some of the incentives for reducing carbon emissions. Previously, the ‘payback’ option would have ensured that organisations taking real steps to reduce their energy consumption would have been rewarded. Now the scheme operates as a tax on energy. It also makes the retention of the league table much less effective.
How many people are directly involved with working on the CRC and did they require any additional training?
Preparation for the CRC has been a combined effort involving many employees across the business. It has been led, at an executive level, by our group directors for property services and finance and resources. Our asset management and energy and sustainability teams have been responsible for the collation of the relevant data, assisted by our procurement team and an external consultant. Our group financial controller has been responsible for checking the requirements of the scheme and ensuring its correct application to our complex group structure, and different parts of the business have been involved with verifying the data. I am responsible for reporting on our performance so, all in all, that’s a lot of people involved in making sure that we are compliant!
We haven’t needed to put in place any additional training but we have invested in some additional computer software to help us keep track of our consumption and emissions more efficiently.
Before the introduction of the CRC, was energy management a consideration for you?
Yes. Sanctuary has been working on reducing energy for several years and established its dedicated energy team in 2006. In 2010, we received the Carbon Trust Standard after measuring and improving our carbon efficiency by 13.1% (tonnes CO2e / £ turnover) over the past three years. In more recent years the amount of resource and personnel dedicated to this area has increased, as the requirements placed on businesses have grown.
What have been the main changes you have made to your buildings to reduce your energy use?
We were already making improvements to our buildings before the CRC was put in place and these have continued alongside our preparations for the scheme.
For our housing stock, we carry out a rolling programme of improvements. This has included fitting loft and cavity wall insulation, A-rated energy-efficient boilers and double-glazed doors and windows. We have also installed a wide variety of renewable technologies to the homes of our tenants, including air source heat pumps and solar thermal heating, and we have just begun fitting solar photovoltaic technology to 400 homes in the south west. Unfortunately, these improvements fall outside of our organisational energy usage so are not included in the scope of the CRC Scheme.
In our larger buildings, such as care homes, student accommodation and offices, a number of energy-saving initiatives are in place. We have installed boiler management systems in our care homes and larger sheltered housing schemes, which are designed to reduce fuel consumption, heating costs and CO2 emissions. Some buildings also benefit from renewable technologies, such as our extra care scheme in Roman Ridge in Sheffield, which has a biomass system which runs on locally sourced wood pellets. In addition, we have used technology to save energy in our offices by swapping standard PCs for Wyse terminals, which use up to 90% less energy, and installing infrared sensor systems which turn off lights when rooms are not in use.
How have you ensured that all your staff are on board?
We have introduced energy efficiency training for our internal maintenance service operatives, which is delivered in conjunction with Act on Energy through a series of ‘toolbox talks’. We have also run different initiatives to raise staff awareness around saving energy, participating in national events such as Energy Efficiency Week and Climate Week. More training and publicity is planned for the future to make sure that everyone is on board.
How important is your league table position for your customers?
Green issues ranked highly with our residents in a recent consultation and we are implementing a number of initiatives which are designed to address the issues which our customers care about, including fuel poverty and energy efficiency in the home.
However any improvements we make to our housing won’t be included in the scheme or reflected by our position on the league table, so we do not expect this to be an issue of significant importance to our customers.
Are you integrating any other sustainability initiatives that are not specifically linked with carbon?
Yes. Under our environmental and sustainability strategy we focus on six core areas: energy efficiency, climate change, water, biodiversity, transport and waste. We monitor our performance against the SHIFT index, a sustainability benchmark for housing providers which looks at all aspects of our performance, covering strategy and management, offices, existing buildings and new build. Last year, we secured silver status in the index.
In our development programme we have aimed to be innovative in integrating all aspects of sustainability into our buildings. Our new state-of-the-art accommodation for people working at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and The Rosie in Cambridge has been constructed to the highest specifications and is pioneering in design. It incorporates some of the latest green design features, including a green roof which is planted with a variety of different plants to provide habitats for birds and insects and a brown roof which is covered with a layer of soil to balance water run-off. This is addition to a solar thermal hot water system, external elevations made from natural cedar wood sourced from sustainable sources, cycleways, footpaths and on-site recycling facilities.
What have been your most successful carbon-saving ideas? Any that haven’t worked?
One of our most successful initiatives to date has been the installation of a heat harvesting system in our Worcester office, which uses waste energy from computer servers to heat the buildings on site. In the first year of its operation the technology assisted us in reducing the carbon footprint of the server room from 128.5 tonnes to 84.3 tonnes, and also won us a Datacentre Leaders Award for Leadership in the Public Sector. This year, we completed two new buildings on our Worcester site which are also powered by the system.
We have had no real disasters yet and adopt a careful approach to implementing any new ideas. We expect all initiatives to have varying levels of success but there are few projects which can’t be put right or improved with a positive mental attitude!
This article originally appeared in Greenbuild magazine's September/October 2011 issue. For a free subscription, please click here .
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