Agenda item

Verbal update from ICRWG members

This item was taken before the Joint Waste Governance Arrangement item as Councillor Wheeldon, a member of the Internal Waste Working Group had to leave.

The Chair introduced the item and explained that the verbal update came in anticipation of the formal report back to the committee from the working group.

Councillors Wheeldon, Bickerton and McCloskey introduced themselves as members of the Internal Carbon Reduction Working Group (ICRWG).

Councillor Wheeldon confirmed that the first activity of the ICRWG was to establish the baseline CO2 emissions against which progress would be measured and the group chose the 2005 figure that many other organisations used.  This covered emissions from energy use in buildings, the vehicle fleet and business travel and excluded figures from Cheltenham Borough Homes. 

The Council had undertaken various energy saving initiatives over the last few years, switching to low energy lighting, installing time switches, etc and each of these relatively small things had equated to a reduction of almost 500 tonnes of carbon emissions since 2005, which was a substantial cut.

The comment by the Cabinet Member Sustainability earlier in the meeting about setting a target reduction of 30% by 2015 had come as a pleasant surprise.  Friends of the Earth had made a presentation to the working group on their ‘Get Serious’ campaign and challenged the Council to set a target reduction of 40% across the Borough by 2020.  The working group felt that they were unable to commit to a borough-wide reduction but did feel that such a reduction by the Council was feasible.

Invest to save had been another area of work for the group and the need to consider initiatives with a longer term payback period would form one of the recommendations of the working group back to the committee.  Whilst aware of the budget constraints, saving energy equated to saving money. 

In October 2011 the Councils electricity contract was due for renewal.  Were the Council to switch to a wholly green source it could reduce its carbon emissions by up to 25%, but the increased cost would need to be offset against this. 

Councillor Bickerton explained that the current initiatives were similar to those being undertaken by people in their homes, investing in LED light, etc.  However, making the change to a greener electricity supplier would provide a much larger scale impact. 

Other options could include using solar panels to create electricity which would require a big investment and a payback period of around 10 years.  Perhaps in the future the Council could consider replacing its fleet with electric vehicles when prices were more reasonable. 

Councillor Wheeldon interjected, there was an urgency to the solar panel decision because the financial viability of any project depended on the national feed-in tariff scheme.  Prices were fixed for applicants entering the scheme before April 2012 and applied for 25 years thereafter, but the Government and could change the tariff levels and rules for applications after that date.  This could mean that any project planned after April 2012 would no longer be financially viable.

In addition to the update provided by her colleagues on the working group, Councillor McCloskey detailed the move to replace laptops and PCs with data terminals which produced less heat and were more efficient as well as replacing air conditioning with evaporative cooling systems.

The Cabinet Member Sustainability explained the process with which evaporative cooling systems used water to cool the air. 

The Chair thanked the members for their involvement to date, wished the group luck with future endeavours and looked forward to the reviewing their final recommendations. 

Councillor Wheeldon left at 7.45pm.