Peterborough City Council

[Tristan_Parker]

Peterborough City Council has been developing a Community Energy Challenge project, enabling residents within the city to save energy and become more energy efficient through a “competitive yet interesting” scheme which allows them to borrow energy meters and track their progress.

The project’s main aim was to raise awareness of domestic energy usage and efficiency, but to do so in a way that engaged residents’ attention. It was seen as crucial to communicate the message to residents that saving energy is also conducive to financial savings, and that this can be visibly demonstrated through lower energy bills.

The first Community Energy Challenge was held in the Werrington area of Peterborough during February. The scheme – which also directly contributes to the city’s Environment Capital and climate change agendas – involves up to 60 residents borrowing an energy monitor (provided by energy saving company Efergy) for up to three weeks, at no cost.

Residents were then asked to keep a weekly record of their energy usage in a provided diary. As the users were able to see how much energy was being used at any given time (including consumption in terms of cost and Kwh), they could then learn, as a household, which appliances were using the most energy.

Before the onset of the challenge a launch event was held, allowing the energy meters and diaries to be distributed, along with instructions on how the challenge would run. Residents were asked to use the monitors as follows:

Week 1 – plug their monitor in but do nothing different in terms of energy usage.
Week 2 – consciously try and save as much energy as possible for a week and then record the total.
Week 3 – try to maintain or lower the second week’s energy usage and then record the week total.

A competitive element was also encouraged in order to drive down energy use – both from households trying to improve their own performance week-on-week, and between separate households. This culminated in a celebratory event some weeks after the challenge was finished (in order for the energy diaries to be collected and results to be collated), with prizes awarded to participants who saved the most energy during the challenge.

Key findings from the Werrington study were as follows:

• The volunteers were predominantly families, although all aspects of the community were represented in the sample (families, individuals, couples young and old and houses of multiple occupancy)
• A 100% participation rate was achieved in the trial, with all 60 meters loaned out
• 63% of participants returned their energy diary, with 33% of them showing a downward trend despite half-term being in the middle of the challenge, which skewed many results.
• 83% found the energy meter easy to use
• 69% preferred to use the Kwh mode of the energy meter
• 67% of those who responded said that the meters would help them change their energy habits around the home in the future

The project is now being rolled out across other communities in Peterborough. A special Employee Energy Challenge was also launched in June, which runs in the same format but is open to any business employee across the city. The results of this part of the project will be available in July.

The Community Energy Challenge project builds upon Peterborough City Council’s ‘Your Footprint Counts’ climate change campaign, which saw the Efergy energy meters placed in libraries around the city, ready for residents to borrow.

As well as helping to develop the Community Energy Challenge project, Peterborough City Council also has a range of other plans to tackle climate change and lower carbon emissions directly from its own operations. In April of this year, the council’s Carbon Management Action Plan was adapted to focus on a model which is hoped to create a 35% reduction in carbon emissions from 2008/09 levels by 2014.

The council is also working to achieve the city’s target of becoming the acknowledged Environment Capital of the UK. Though an ambitious goal for any city, Peterborough already has a number of impressive starting points to help the drive towards this goal, including the following:

• Peterborough is one of only three sustainable transport demonstration towns
• The city boasts the largest cluster of environmental businesses in the country, with its own eco-innovation centre
• In 2007/8 Peterborough had the highest recycling rate for any unitary authority in the country, and can now recycle glass in its green bins
• Peterborough has been selected for a Carbon Challenge site, which will deliver 450 dwellings on the city’s south bank. All these homes will be sustainable, environmentally friendly and zero carbon rated.