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EMU Project - Shortlisted for the prestigious Energy Awards

EMU Logo

EMU (Environmental Move for U) has been shortlisted for the country's premier energy and carbon related awards. The awards are sponsored and judged by some of biggest names and companies in the industries. EMU was an innovative, effective and replicable collaboration project between Estates and the School of Health (SOH) . The target was to maximise engagement in carbon management; promote collegiality and engender well-being and to prepare and move 150 staff and 3,000 students from an 'off campus' building to a new 'GREEN' building on City Campus. To succeed where many others have failed (including ourselves) we recognised a need for an engagement project within the old building which would provide the foundation for success in the new building. This represented a challenge, a large physical area to influence and encourage sustainable behaviour from staff entering programme review. However, the project resulted in achieving unprecedented savings of 33% in the metered areas.

Previous campaigns at the University, although judged as a success was difficult to feedback and quantify. To those taking part the real impact was that they had made quantifiable differences. A common question from these participants from these schemes was 'what difference have I made?' Prior to this it was difficult to answer this with any degree of confidence. This metering system has not only allowed that but the greening team, as part of this project, could see in some instances within a few minutes that they had made a difference. Some members of the greening team reported it as being addictive and empowering.

Starting in January 2011, a detailed programme was developed to address this. To measure change an innovative, web-based metering system (edd:e) was installed in February 2011. This allowed detailed analysis of electricity usage down to individual sockets. The Greening team were trained and empowered to interpret the Edd:e data. Staff were initially not informed to record the 'business as usual' baseline prior to the start of the saving interventions.

EMU Savings Graph

The outcome of EMU has resulted in staff/students being engaged, informed and educated in successful sustainable use of new building whilst achieving unprecedented energy savings. Eliminating seasonal variances and other anomalies demonstrated an average saving of 33% with peak savings reaching 43%. This provides hard evidence of what a behaviour change programme can achieve against the traditionally accepted 10%.

The award ceremony is on Dec. 1^st at St Pauls Grange, London and will be attended by members of the project team consisting of staff from both Estates and the School of Health. More details on the Energy Awards can be found here:

(External) http://www.theenergyawards.com/306521