Don’t crumble in the crunch!
June 21st 2009 Managing costs and complying with legislation across Leisure Connection’s 60 sites is a tall order but savings are occurring and there is still more to come says Paul Bailey, Leisure Connection
Leisure Connection is the major UK management company for outsourced Leisure, Arts, Culture and Fitness, and among our clients are local authorities, national sporting bodies and private companies.
Our core business is to manage facilities on behalf of local authorities and we currently have over 60 sites in 28 local authorities across the UK. The estate stretches from Newcastle down to St Ives in Cornwall, and the age of our buildings ranges from the 12th century to less than a year old. You can imagine the challenges in maintaining a haunted medieval building like Bisham Abbey, where staff are convinced that Lady Hoby regularly goes around messing with the heating and lighting controls. At Bisham, English Heritage will be involved in choosing what paint we use and what mortar is employed to re-point brickwork.We also take on brand new buildings, getting them functioning and operational while working with builders through the defects period.
So our estate is a mixed bag in terms of energy, and our Display Energy Certificate (DECs) paint a pretty diverse picture. All together, and given we are generally open to the public from 6.30 in the morning to 10.30 at night (in the case of the National Sports Centres – 24/7), they consume a huge amount energy representing the second biggest cost to our business. As a consequence, this is one of our top priorities in terms of cost control.
As a group, we use a total of 150GWh of electricity and fuel annually – over 70% of that is heating fuel (mainly gas but with a significant amount of heating oil) and a tad under 30% of electricity.We also use over one million cubic metres of water each year, most of which goes back into the drainage system heated and chlorinated.
The drivers to reduce consumption are legislation, the cost of energy and the unpredictability of supply (and therefore prices) and the reduction of our carbon footprint. But Energy Management also has the added value of good PR and increasing our Quest score, a nationally recognised benchmark by which all leisure operators are judged.
Given our annual energy consumption, we will be included in the Carbon Reduction Commitment, (absolutely no wriggle room there) and with the new draft regulation including heavy fines for being late or non compliant, it is indeed a very strong driver for us to focus, and to look for ways to mitigate the effects of CRC, and even benefit from it as a business.
I am sure everyone knows the old adage “If you don’t measure it, you don’t stand a chance of managing it.” We are introducing ways of showing and demonstrating usage (and more importantly savings). We publish monthly league tables within the company, showing good and poor energy performance. No-one likes to be at the bottom of such a public league table and generally our business managers are a pretty competitive lot, so it is having an effect. Most of our sites are over 100kW and require half-hourly metering: this data is key in profiling consumption and identifying baseloads and unusual patterns of use. We have started to install Automatic Meter Readers for gas, which immediately show up any unusual patterns and allow us to focus and react. The importance of knowing in detail the consumption profiles of our big complex buildings cannot be stressed enough.
Once the measuring is done and we are in a position to target and prove savings,we can seek and apply cultural and technological changes.
In the cultural or ‘hearts and minds’ area, there are three parts to the equation, ourselves, our clients (local authorities, governing bodies and so on) and our customers (people who walk in through the door – families, children,over 60s, doctors’ referrals and disabled – a cross section of the local community). It is hugely important to make sure all three are on board.
Internally.We have a network of Energy Champions on our sites: the qualifying asset for them is that they want to do it and they care about making a difference, and through that network we are communicating information, running energy campaigns and we are actually seeing savings, in one case as much as 40%.This network is also a conduit for sites to feed back information and energy-related problems, so that we can react to challenges quickly. The culture is further strengthened by Energy Roadshows which visit regions and show simple ways to save energy at work and at home. Soon,we will also be delivering these workshops to our clients’Energy Champions. If they do not yet have them,we hope it will act as a spur and perhaps start the process.For us as a business, saving kWh strengthens our bottom line and gives us some protection in these difficult times.
Our clients. Our local authority clients have an obligation to reduce their carbon footprint but unlike us are able to obtain grants to assist in this process.We are able to help in advising on schemes and equipment, and we can project manage energy saving schemes for them, creating mutual benefits – kWh for us, carbon for them.
In nearly all of our contracts we are responsible for paying utility costs and so it makes sense to work together as the emissions from a leisure centre will make a significant contribution to the carbon footprint of the authority’s whole estate.Our customers. Being operators in the public sector,we were obliged to produce Display Energy Certificates which are posted at our receptions and in full view of the public. The more informed are already taking an interest and asking questions, but to involve our customers in our efforts to reduce consumption, we need to engage them and their children in our campaigns, publicise our successes (maybe through the local newspapers or just front of house posters and displays) and lead by example.
The role of technology
Building on a Carbon Trust Energy Opportunities Survey at 10 typical sites, we developed various models of technology which we felt confident would increase efficiency.We trialled different technologies on one site until we were sure we had all the best technologies working together in concert and to best effect. This gave us a very good idea of where the ‘low hanging fruit’ was. However, as we readied ourselves to roll out these technologies the Crunch arrived and priorities changed overnight.
The Crunch is foremost in everyone’s mind and we are all definitely feeling the pinch.We are having difficulty in getting credit to purchase anything, let alone energy saving technology, and competition for available cash increases with pressing defensive spends against the crunch.
Local authorities can vary in the degree to which they are committed to saving Carbon, and it is my role to inform them and assist them in achieving carbon savings on their buildings.Some have grabbed the torch and run with it, while others have put it in a mental ‘pending file’.
Technology moves forward, improves and gets cheaper. Each manufacturer has their own sales pitch, with claims that their equipment is better than the rest, and with a bottomless pit of cash we would have no problem in testing which was best, but with ever decreasing resources we are looking for the cheapest technology with maximum return on investment in order to prioritise expenditure.
The private sector is under severe economic pressure from the Credit Crunch, and we need to prioritise even more than before.We need grants – we get very little financial assistance. We need the energy sector and manufacturers of energy equipment to understand that if we are to recommend or buy equipment, free trials to help prove they work will make it easier to convince our clients and Boards that tightly held funds should be spent on energy savings first.We need good payment terms and schemes that will ease the burden, allowing us to start spending in the right areas.We need to be able to spend now for longer term gains. More articles from WEE News Desk: | 
