What's this all about?
A considerable amount of money is spent on energy (electricity and gas) that offers no business value to Chelsea. Day to day we all use energy from operating our computers, keeping warm in the winter or cool in the summer to switching lights on in the office.
You probably feel the same about the money you have to spend on household bills. We would all rather spend it on other things.
Energy is a large percentage of the running costs of our business.
We need to do reduce the amount of energy we consume and have set ourselves a target of 7.5% for 2008.
Why are we doing it?
We take our environmental impacts very seriously. They can have serious implications on a business' reputation. Customers are becoming increasingly aware of green issues and are choosing suppliers and products with better green credentials.
What was said
Last year we ran a series of focus groups on environmental issues to identify the key priorities for staff. Energy was one of their top 5 priorities.
How we plan to reduce energy at Chelsea
Much work has already been done by Chelsea's Site Services to assist in achieving reductions at Head Office. We have created energy coordinators in the branch network, one in each branch and we now plan to introduce head office coordinators. We are currently developing an environmental policy.
Our progress
What we've done so far:
- made lots and lots of changes to the computerised building management system that controls much of the air conditioning/heating.
- restaurant and atrium lights have been changed to low energy
- timers introduced on all external lighting
- decommissioned some older 'power hungry' equipment which formerly served the computer room at Head Office
- progressed development of a system to automatically shut down PCs at night.
Graph depicts our activity and progress so far at Head Office:
