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10-year savings
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Accelerating decarbonisation across 10 schools
Inspiring Futures through Learning (IFtL) Multi Academy Trust, established in 2016, encompasses 16 schools across Milton Keynes and Corby, Northamptonshire. With a vision to ‘inspire the futures of us all through learning together’ the Trust is proud of the way they work together, sharing excellence in practice and developing people to positively impact over 6000 children and their families.
A key strand of the trust’s strategic plan centred around being “future focused.” As part of this, the trust was determined that their responsibilities to the environment would be reflected and embedded in their curriculum and learning, as well as everyday practice and use of resources, aligned with their environmental strategy and targets to reduce their carbon footprint
The Challenge.
As part of the Trust’s path to Net Zero, IFtL had developed a Net Zero roadmap and were looking for a partner to help them deploy net zero technologies across their estate as well as engaging pupils and the wider school community in the journey towards Net Zero.
As a first stage, IFtL had identified the need to replace their lighting with modern, energy efficient LED lighting to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions. Ageing and inefficient lighting was contributing to high levels of failures and maintenance costs as well as high energy costs, with much of the lighting obsolete.
The Trust were looking to fund the project using their own capital reserves.
The Trust tendered for the project, which involved replacing 3964 luminaires across 10 of the Trust’s schools. Against stiff competition, eEnergy were successful in winning the bid; IFtL were impressed by eEnergy’s commercial proposal and track record of delivering multi-site lighting projects in an education environment.
The Solution.
eEnergy’s expert lighting design team, identified a solution to provide a lighter, brighter learning environment, whilst simultaneously delivering a significant reduction in lighting energy usage. The lighting installation comprised of a point-for-point replacement of 3964 luminaires across 10 schools using high quality European sourced LED lighting.
To enable a seamless, hassle-free deployment for IFtL, eEnergy provided a fully project managed installation with ongoing maintenance included as well as lighting survey and system design to deliver optimum lighting levels throughout the school estate.
eEnergy also helped the trust to cut the costs of their LED lighting project by 50%. Working in partnership with the trust, we provided benchmarking data, costs and carbon savings to facilitate a successful funding bid to the local council for 50% of the project costs for LED.
The Results.
New energy efficient LED lighting has been installed in 10 schools across the Trust , spanning 3964 luminaires. The installation took place over a 2-month period in February and March 2024 with out-of-hours installation to minimise operational disruption for the Trust.
The transition to LED lighting across the school estate has delivered a transformational impact with a lighter, brighter learning environment for staff and pupils. The new, energy efficient lighting has reduced lighting energy costs by 59%, delivering recurring revenue savings; precious money for the Trust to reinvest back into pupil-centred priorities.
What’s more, the installation of MY ZeERO intelligent monitoring is providing real time insights into energy wastage , enabling a 10% reduction in energy usage through behavioural changes and validating the savings from the LED lighting installation. This data is being used to engage pupils in the Net Zero journey via IFtL’s Student Parliament
eEnergy’s Net Zero partnership with IFtL doesn’t stop there. The next step is to deploy rooftop solar energy, providing a further 20% reduction in energy costs, lower carbon emissions and increase energy resilience.
- 56.7 TC02e annual carbon saving
- £618,368 10-year net saving
- £78,289 year 1 gross saving
- 59% reduction in electricity costs from lighting
Inspiring Futures through Learning testimonial.
“We’ve enjoyed working with eEnergy, it was important for us to have an expert who understood the needs of schools. Energy’s team have worked seamlessly to deliver our LED installation, with minimal disruption to the school. We very much view eEnergy as our long-term sustainability partner and the next steps will be to review the deployment of Solar, MY ZeERO and EV charging across the wider estate.”
Sarah Bennett, CEO
