This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008.
A bold request for funding led to an energy efficiency project being run right across one Local Authorities LSP (Local Strategic Partnership) bringing them together around one table to discuss energy efficiency. Who knows where it might lead?
Be bold! Ask for a million £
A story told in the “Tales
from the Carbon Face” story circle
I am going to tell a story about a project we have been running in Bath and NE Somerset which we call OBEC - which stands for Our Big Energy Challenge. I guess that we talk about it at as an innovation. I am slightly wary of the term because I think there are some aspects of it that are very obvious and that should be being done anyway and that is not particularly innovative. But the innovative bit is about running an energy efficiency project across all of the public sector organizations in our local strategic partnership (LSP). So I think that that is the bit that no-one has really done before.
And I think the reason it is working is
because we were very successful in getting a bit (of funding) from the treasury back in 2005 to run a three-year
energy efficiency program. And we asked for a million pounds and everyone went
“Oooh! That is too much. You won’t get
that,” but actually, I think because we were bold enough to ask for large
amounts of money that is why we got it and because we were saying that we were
going to do this across the whole area.
And
what has been really interesting about the project is, I mean, it is difficult
to say at this moment how successful it has been in terms of carbon reduction. It has got two parts to it: there is the
technical side which is more what is being implemented now. The other half of
the money is being spent on payment for change work which is much, much more
difficult to get going and it is only just beginning in a lot of the
organizations. And yes, I think that the people running the project - I think
they thought that it would be relatively easy to roll out the kind of formulae
that they had worked with other organizations across these organizations when
in fact you cannot. What we found is that a huge
amount of effort had to go into the designing specific schemes for the council,
the university and so on. We have really had to think very hard about how do
you run an energy efficiency scheme involving a workforce at a hospital for
example.
So
there are still a lot of challenges within the project that we have not yet
overcome I would say, but I think to me the really exciting part of that will
make it very successful in the future is the fact that for the first time
ever - certainly in this area -
we have got all of those people sitting around the table. We have got a
project board: we have got senior people from the council, from the leading two
universities, the housing trust, hospitals, the primary care trust – these are all
sitting around the table talking about for the first time ever about energy
efficiency and the benefits to their organization of doing this.
So
what I am thinking—that is a foundation stone for building more sustainable
energy work with the district in the future. And that might lead us to some of
these more exciting things that we have been hearing about today, that is my
hope fingers crossed, that this could be the start of something.
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