Reducing energy consumption from student residences

Reducing energy consumption from student residences

Dr John Brenton, Head of Energy and Carbon Reduction at TEC

Student residences account for a significant share of energy use within the education estate, consuming around 15% of an institution’s energy use.  For those institutions who run their own accommodation, this provides an opportunity to reduce energy consumption and carbon. Earlier this year TEC carried out a survey to explore approaches to residences amongst the membership. We spoke with Dr John Brenton, Head of Energy and Carbon Reduction at TEC, to find out what the survey revealed – and what good practice looks like.  

Why did you carry out the survey and what did you hope to achieve? 

The aim was to benchmark mean and good practice for electricity, gas, heat and water consumption for residences operated by higher education institutions. Residences have quite a narrow remit so there is scope to investigate consumption using building-level data, which a lot of institutions have. We know from the Higher Education Statistics Agency that about 15% of energy goes to residences so there is good potential to reduce consumption. 

What level of responses did you receive, and were these representative of the range of institutions across the higher education sector? 

Only about 16 institutions responded, which is a relatively small sample size, but we had data from 125 residences across the sector. A few institutions got in touch to say that they didn’t have building level data for any of their residences, so, in a sense, we were skewed to those institutions who had good data. Our response group was also weighted towards the south of England.  

We are repeating the survey now and it would be great to get a much wider spread of institutions taking part.  

Did you glean any ‘quick wins’ for institutions from the survey? 

For some universities, we were able to detect an obvious outlier in their data and go back to them to find out what caused it. This could be a real overheating problem, a water leak or finding out that another building was being backfed from the residence. Residences built before 1960 all tended to perform poorly. We might expect this but it was helpful to see the data confirm this. 

What are the main conclusions you have drawn from the survey? 

We drew some interesting findings in relation to expected gas and electricity consumption.  

We were able to establish benchmarks for self-catered halls that use gas for space and water heat and electrically heated halls. Members can compare their consumption with these benchmarks and see if there are possibilities for savings. These are good rules of thumb that members can use straight away.  

Likewise, we established a benchmark for annual water use. Water use per square metre of floor area is large in comparison with the academic estate, so checking whether a hall is especially wasteful is very important, especially as we want to play our part in these times of water scarcity. 

Giving students visual information about the length of a shower, for example using a digital timer, is helpful in reducing consumption, as is information on average shower. For most people, four or five minutes feels like a long shower and it’s often useful to ask students to think about the resources associated with showering. 

Installing visual timers in showers is also good practice which has been shown to reduce average shower lengths. 

Showering efficiently really is a way that students can have a significant beneficial effects on the environment, especially as we refill reservoirs after the second drought in four years. We have some webinars on our website about this topic.

In addition, some institutions have checked they are not inadvertently overheating their water to deal with the Legionella risk. 

What are the next steps to help members manage energy and carbon reduction from their residences? 

Halls respond well to all the normal good practice: good metering, good controls, good lighting, improvements to insulation and solar. Ensuring you have good metering in residences enables you to make Climate Change Levy and VAT savings.  

Education and behaviour change is also important. If students cook in expensive early evening periods, institutions can encourage them to learn to cook together, and advise on good energy practice in cooking.  

They can also automatically slightly reduce setback temperatures of electrical space heating when prices are at their highest – particularly between 4pm and 7pm on weekdays between November and February, when Capacity Market Charges are levied.   

We’ll be discussing more about residences energy, water scarcity, time-of-use charges and Legionella control at Conference – please, come along (info here).  

In the meantime, please get in touch with enquiries@tec.ac.uk with TECRESI2526 in the subject line if you can contribute data for the 25/26 academic year, and we will send you a spreadsheet to fill in. We will be presenting anonymized results at Conference.