LASER provides Rother District Council with expert advice and planning to help them reduce the carbon footprint of village and community halls within their district.
In September 2019, Rother District Council declared a climate emergency and pledged to become carbon neutral by 2030.
As part of their carbon neutral pledge, Rother District Council (RDC) identified an opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint of village and community halls within their district, resulting in the ‘The Village Halls Energy Project’ (VHEP). The scheme was funded by Rother District Council’s CIL Climate Emergency Bonus Fund (CEBF). 20% of the Council’s Strategic CIL payments are ringfenced into the CEBF to be allocated to infrastructure projects that support the council’s target to be a net zero district by 2030. Village halls were a focus because protecting and enhancing these features in RDC’s ‘Core Strategy’. The project identified and addressed areas of energy inefficiency and high carbon emissions in 39 charity owned village and community halls across the Rother district, whilst also allowing the council to enhance their core strategy to protect and provide new, extended or refurbished facilities.
Rother District Council came to us with a well-developed plan to carry out site decarbonisation surveys and identified funding streams for both the surveys and the delivery of the identified projects.
LASER were brought in to carry out the VHEP Phase 1 – which consisted of surveying the halls, identifying applicable decarbonisation projects and estimating costs and savings – and were instantly faced with an abundance of challenges:
Firstly, with 39 separate sites, the size and variety of the project would be problematic. Many of the buildings identified by Rother had differing building types and structures, and also varied in age and size. This led to issues in trying to determine a standardised approach between all locations, which would be the most consistent strategy, and finding a way to deliver insight and actions to a wide range of stakeholders who have varying levels of knowledge across the council.
We took a methodical approach to tackling the challenge, breaking it down into a clear and simple process:
When it came to issuing the initial reports to the Village Halls, LASER and Rother District Council ran a single, all-encompassing workshop to provide context to Village Hall stakeholders, most of whom had little-to-no energy knowledge. It was imperative that we provided as much education on what stakeholders should expect from this project. We took the time to explain the approach and technologies involved, and how the reports would be presented so the information could be easily interpreted and digested. This led to great engagement from those in attendance and the Council received some brilliant feedback from this event. From a technology perspective, we looked to introduce as wide a range as possible, coupled with recommendations we knew would work from previous experience working on similar projects.
From the Council’s perspective, they were very happy they would now be able to provide their sites with simple, site-specific data. LASER produced 39 overall survey reports to drill down into what each site needed, leading to over 160 recommended actions over 60 reports. In the first round of grant funding, £228.7K has been committed to recommendations expected to save an estimated 1,115 Tonnes of CO2e over their lifetime. A second round of VHEP funding is currently underway. What came apparent thereafter, however, was that they also required more detailed, overarching information. We took this onboard and produced a single report that focused on benchmarking, highlighting areas such as best performing and worst performing buildings in terms of energy efficiency, costs and emissions. This showed where the best opportunities might exist and which sites to prioritise for Phase 2. In addition, we also provided a full list of recommendations and estimated savings to allow RDC to process and analyse these in their own way, too.
As a new financial year begins so does a change to our leadership within LASER. We say goodbye to our previous Managing Director of ten years, Nigel Hartnup, and welcome a new look leadership team.
LASER provides Rother District Council with expert advice and planning to help them reduce the carbon footprint of village and community halls within their district.
npower Business Solutions (nBS), LASER’s Flexible Electricity Framework supplier, donated £100,000 to 52 local food bank charities to help people facing food poverty up and down the country.