Energy Savings Week with BT

Last week was the Energy Saving Trust's annual Energy Saving Week and to mark the occasion BT's energy and carbon team invited us to raise awareness with their staff.

We spent one day in BT Centre in London and another day on their huge Adastral Park site in Ipswich. On both days we ran a YouWatt light bulb challenge inviting members of staff to hop on the bike to see how many watts they could generate after first experiencing the resistance increasing to light all four bulbs simultaneously.

The sustainability team at BT are tasked with reducing BT's energy consumption across the business by inspiring individual staff behaviour changes, costing-in and implementing improvements to their office and call centre buildings and pushing for improvements to be made to improved the energy efficiency with BT's network. It's a huge task for such a large organisation, they have around 87,000 employees.

We were shocked to hear that their annual energy bill for the UK is around £250 million (around 70% of that is required to run the network). This accounts for 0.7% of the UK's total energy usage! The good news is since the BT energy programme launched in 2008/2009 they have managed to reduce their energy consumption year on year.

During last week's activity they were simply encouraging staff to switch off their laptops, and lights and ensure they don't leave things on standby. The small actions count too. The Energy Savings Trust did a great job by sending a box full of goodies and leaflets to hand out to help people take control of their energy bills at home, including small egg timers to take into the shower to try and cut down the time they're in there. So simple, but effective.