New Energy Manager Hired!

A piece of good news is that the Estates Office has taken on an Energy Manager on a six-month consultancy contract who has just started work here at UWA. This post is also part-funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and comes as a consequence of UWA's involvement with the Carbon Trust Higher Education Carbon Management Programme (what a mouthful!).

As I understand it, a major piece of work will be to do with improving the building energy management systems for UWA buildings, to see how electricity usage for specific buildings can be monitored remotely (i.e. not having to send someone out to check the meter at the building physically). Another highlight will be conducting feasability studies for introducing biomass boilers in some buildings (these use woodchips, so burning them is an essentially carbon-neutral activity). I've been warned not to expect much physical change in the next few months though - the Energy Manager will have his or her hands full simply with developing costing analyses for various energy-related projects and the steps that need to be taken before engineers or engineering-type people (I plead ignorance at the natural sciences) can actually go out there and deliver changes for carbon savings.