In March our Energy Sparks programme received a £58K grant under the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy Non-domestic Smart Energy Management Innovation Competition. We have used this funding to further develop our website and infrastructure to help schools save energy.
The funding has allowed us to:
- Enhance our education programme for KS3 pupils (originally we just supported KS1 and KS2 pupils) – we now have 70 activities which pupils can complete for which schools get points which contribute to an intra-school scoreboard and competition
- Develop sophisticated automatic analysis of school smart meter data (40 graphs and associated contextual advice)
- Introduce an email and text alert system which automatically notifies different people within a school of changes in energy consumption, energy issues, and for example looks at the weather forecast and notifies the building manager/caretaker that next week’s weather is warm enough for the central heating boilers to be turned off (14 different alerts)
- Developed an electrical simulator which breaks down electricity usage to appliances within a school
We currently have 13 schools in B&NES using the website.
We are currently applying for phase 2 & 3 funding to help us extend the website further and rollout Energy Sparks to other areas of the country.
If you know of a local school which would be interested in joining this free programme, please get in contact with us?
Please also contact us if you would be interested in becoming a trustee of the project to help us guide this programme going forward? The commitment would be to attend meetings (Skype?) of about an hour 2 or 3 times a year.
We are grateful for the sponsorship of the programme received from the Open Data Institute, BWCE, Ovo Energy Foundation, Naturesave Trust, and the ongoing support of B&NES.