The drive for efficiency

In 2007, we continued our drive to improve energy efficiency at our offices and other premises as well as on the railway. Having reduced our energy consumption at our head office, 15 Westferry Circus in Canary Wharf, by 3 per cent in 2006, we set a business objective to achieve a further 2 per cent reduction across our head office, satellite offices in Stratford and the Piccadilly line depots in 2007.

We manage and pay for energy use at our head office and satellite offices, but not at the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly line stations or depots where London Underground is the bill payer. However, we made the decision to include the Piccadilly line depots in our business objective as we directly manage activities at these depots.

We exceeded our expectations to achieve a 20 per cent reduction, thanks to a combination of behavioural change and targeting the facilities that use the most energy, such as air conditioning, lighting and lifts.

Lifts and revolving doors were taken out of service out of hours, movement sensors were fitted to plasma screens and core lighting was reviewed and adjusted. We now turn off unnecessary lights during daylight hours and have reduced the time out-of-hours lighting stays on from 1 hour to 30 minutes.

“It’s a question of constantly looking at our energy use and fine-tuning it,” explains Facilities Manager Clive Jones. “Communication and understanding are essential too and the support for energy efficiency has been getting progressively better over the last couple of years.

“We use lighting and air conditioning only when it is needed and water temperatures have been turned down by a degree, although obviously within safe levels. With the exception of peak times, we only use one of the two revolving doors at our Westferry Circus headquarters. At our Stratford sites we went through the Building Management Systems (BMS) with a fine toothcomb. This only took a few hours and enabled us to make some adjustments that made a huge difference.

“We are constantly looking for new opportunities too, such as chargers for telephones and batteries that use less electricity by working from the hard drive of a PC. Our next target will be water consumption, where we are hoping to achieve massive savings too.”

IT upgrade

Plans for an IT upgrade were laid in 2007, ready for roll-out in 2008. This will bring dramatic improvements in efficiency as well as CO₂ savings. Additionally, as part of our response to the new European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment regulations, we have been working to identify good homes for our soon-to-be-redundant computers away from the landfill sites. Our IT department has signed up to Computing magazine's Green Computing campaign that aims to raise awareness of environmental issues in IT departments.

Electricity for trains

One of the Underground’s biggest environmental impacts is the electricity used to run trains. Under our PPP contract, we are carrying out signalling upgrades on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, for completion in 2009, 2011 and 2014 respectively.

These upgrades will introduce more equipment to the network, bringing increased capacity and more frequent, faster trains – and increased energy use.

The good news from the environmental perspective is that, based on carbon emissions, rail is the best form of public transport in London. The increased capacity and reliability that the signal upgrades will bring are expected to boost modal shift by motivating more people to leave their cars at home and use public transport.

Meanwhile, we are doing all we can to ensure that the new Piccadilly line rolling stock, due in 2014, is as energy-efficient and sustainable as possible, particularly since the new trains will have many extra features which will increase energy demand. We have requested potential tendering bodies to consider energy, waste, pollution, noise and climate change in designs that cover the complete lifecycle of the trains and their components.

Rain water harvesting

In 2007 we looked at ways to reduce the amount of mains water needed to top up the recycled water used for our train washes. We received the internal go-ahead to install a water harvesting system that will collect rain water to supply 100 per cent of the water for train washing on the Piccadilly line. This system, which will come into use in 2008, will cut out the need for any mains water to be used. It will be the first of its kind on the Underground, if not on the whole of the UK railway network.

 

• Environmental impacts
• Noise
• Waste and materials
• Pollution
• Wildlife
• Energy and utilities
• Climate change