New lighting saves Welsh Water £70k/year
11 Nov 2011
Cardiff, UK – Welsh Water has reduced its electricity bills by £70,000/year as a result of a programme undertaken by Energys Group across 41 Welsh Water sites. The project involved replacing old-style fluorescent lamps with energy-efficient equivalents using its Save It Easy retrofit converter.
Lighting is an essential part of keeping the company running safely, but for Welsh Water it was also an overlooked energy drain, with its old-style T8 fluorescent lamps using an excessive amount of electricity. The obvious solution was to upgrade to new, energy-efficient T5 lamps, but the process for upgrading was not as straightforward as it seemed.
Due to technical and physical differences between the old T8 lamps and the new T5 lamps, an ordinary upgrade would have involved ripping out and replacing all the light fittings making the change uneconomic.
Water and wastewater treatment environments are difficult to work in, and subject to stringent health-and-safety procedures, according to Gary Mercer, customer services director at Energys.
Using the plug-in converter allowed the new T5 lamps to be slotted into the existing light fittings, said Energys. This, it added, meant the lighting upgrade could be carried out without needlessly (and wastefully) tearing out all the existing fittings.
Welsh Water also contracted Energys to carry out the installation process. With 9,623 lamps set to be replaced across 41 sites, mostly on operational water and wastewater treatment plants, the lighting upgrade required extreme precision and a high level of organisation.
During the installation, Energys Services Ltd (ESL), the group’s contracting arm, set out to ensure that health and safety was upheld and disruption to Welsh Water’s operations was kept to a minimum.
“We take health and safety very seriously at Welsh Water, so while the installation was taking place, we carried out two health and safety inspections,” comments Adam Fairman, energy innovation and programme manager at Welsh Water.
“These surprise inspections were designed to make sure that Energys Services Limited was using the correct safety and hygiene procedures,” reported Fairman, noting that the ESL engineers passed every health and safety check.
As a result, he added the project was “non-disruptive and well-organised. We were able to accomplish our goal to reduce our carbon footprint, without compromising the safe running of the company.”
As a result of the project, Welsh Water expects to reduce its company-wide carbon footprint by 442 tonnes of carbon dioxide, while cutting its lighting energy consumption by 823,954 kWh and electricity bills by £70,000.
Welsh Water should also to secure a better position on the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) league table, and reduce the number of carbon allowances it needs to purchase.
