Background

Rio Tinto London Limited’s head office function operates from No 6 St James’s Square, comprising five operational floors, an auditorium and a basement area including car parking facilities. Statius Management Services Limited assisted in implementing their ISO14001 and OHSAS18001 systems.

As part of the 14001 process, energy was identified as being one of the organisation’s significant aspects. Rio Tinto London took the decision to target this area for significant savings and had an energy survey of the building conducted, with the methodology and results highlighted below.

Through Statius, Rio employed a specialist company (another client of Statius), to conduct the survey and identify the findings through a submitted report. To identify issues and potential saving, the company conducted a detailed survey of the building (including walking into empty meeting rooms) to identify energy saving through simple practices such as switching off the lights in empty rooms.

How it was done and what was found including the savings?

A number of meters were installed in the plant rooms monitoring the base load and peak loading over a two-week period, identifying trends and anomalies between the three phases. At the end of the period, detailed trend analysis took place and a number of findings were identified with one of these being that the base load at night and at the weekend, when effectively the building was shut, never fell below 12KVA indicative of some lighting, computers and other equipment being left on.

The survey also identified other potential savings with significant short payback periods. For example:

“Major savings can be made by fitting a Carbon Monoxide monitor to control the functioning of the Car Park Supply and Extract Fans. At present, these are running for 12 hours a day, five days per week. A saving of at least 90% would be made. In addition, the maximum demand and associated on-costs, and maintenance of motor drives would be a saving.”

We at Statius believe the following statement taken from the report strikes at the heart of any business and, for us, enforces the message: The cost of your impact on the environment isn’t measures in trees alone.

“We estimate that an annual saving of £27,000 can be achieved if the recommendations are followed as outlined in the report. Thus, over a period of five years, a saving of £135,000 can be realized, straight to the bottom line”