Australian Legal Sector Alliance - GreenThemes: Energy

Working collaboratively to promote sustainable practice across the legal sector

GreenThemes: Energy

31 January 2014 4:18 PM | Anonymous member

GreenThemes: Energy Ideas

In the FY2013 AusLSA Report 17 of 26 firms reported electricity reductions since the previous year. It's not too late to make an impact to your electricity use this year; even small changes can have big impacts.

The GreenThemes Q1 program is looking at Energy and here are suggestions for things you could do to improve your firm's energy efficiency. Think about:

refreshing or posting signs to remind people to Switch off
posting a video (like the Earth Hour one below) to your intranet
watching a webinar about lighting to see if your lighting could be more efficient
asking your operational staff about server virtualisation
making sure your firm has organised to participate in Earth Hour

Lighting
VECCI and Carbon Compass are currently running a series on lighting from basics, through technologies to grants. You can catch up by watching the recordings or join the final seminar next week. Lighting Technology: Introduction Specific lighting technologies Register for Lighting technologies for business: implementation, funding and subsidies

Switch-off campaigns

Switching off is the easiest way to save electricity (and money!). The trick is establishing new habits. Remind your colleagues to flick the switch with these signs available to download from Carbon Compass.

PC monitors
Monitors use the majority (up to 80%) of your computer's power and turning off the monitor is so quick and easy that there are really no excuses. Attach some of these labels to your colleague's monitors.

Drinks Fridge
Does your firm (or home) have fridges just for drinks? How about using a 24-hour timer to turn the fridge off overnight when you don't need icy cold beverages.

Christmas Day
Greensense monitored energy usage in buildings on Christmas day and found that many offices used as much energy as per a usual work day despite everyone being at home eating seafood and opening gifts. Do you reschedule your office lights, equipment and building automation for public holidays?

Earth Hour - use your power: 29 March 2014

The new campaign for Earth Hour 2014 will be released tomorrow. Subscribe for updates, sign up to the campaign, download tools and participate with 7000 cities and 154 countries across the world.

The Earth Hour videos are always immensely inspiring and a great quick video to share or show to your colleagues. This one shows Earth Hour Sydney in 2012. As you will see there are still offices with lights switched on! Make sure your office isn't one this year.

Earth Hour calendar reminder

TIMELAPSE VIDEO: Earth Hour Sydney

Power save mode

Most office equipment have power save modes - computers, monitors, faxes, printers,etc... Good power saving settings can save hundreds of KWh of electricity per year without any frustrations for staff.

Have a think about how each device is used and investigate what saving settings are possible. You could set:

computer monitors to sleep after 5min and hibernate after 20min
printers to go to sleep at 8pm and wakeup at 7am.

Measuring energy usage

Measuring your energy use is vital is you want to know if your efforts are successful. A plugin energy monitor will let you know immediately how much electricity single appliances draw when in use or turned off.
Calculate the savings when turning off your computer and monitor each day and extrapolate for your entire fleet. Example of a plugin Energy Monitor.

Server Virtualisation

IT servers use a lot of energy and produce a lot of heat (requiring A/C). Virtualising servers can drastically reduce the electricity required. Most firms have already virtualised their servers (and now thinking about cloud-based services). If your firm hasn't yet, you can learn how to do it from other AusLSA Members - see the Virtualisation Case-studies.

	Copyright © 2014 {Organization_Name}. All rights reserved. Contact email: {Organization_Contact_Email}	Facebook \| Twitter \| Unsubscribe
	You are receiving this message because you opted in at {Organization_URL}	With thank to VECCI, Carbon Compass and What can I do right now.

Add comment