ISBA

Autumn 2021 | Environmental sustainability www.theisba.org.uk 30 Now there is an abundance of choice and identifying the right technology for a given situation is often not clear-cut. This is all exciting and invigorating for those of us working in the sector, but I can easily understand how those on the client side would find it easier to put this stuff off to another day; even, dare I say it, until the successor is in post. • Difference in scale. A major feature of any school decarbonisation plan will be the conversion of the heating. Changing an oil or gas boiler may be an unwanted expenditure for a school, but it’s usually a run-of- the-mill project. In many cases the equivalent low carbon project will be a different order of magnitude in terms of financial outlay, physical scale and temporary impact on the school estate during the conversion process. The issue is that low carbon heating solutions tend to lend themselves to a district heating approach, meaning that multiple existing plant rooms end up being served by one central low carbon system. The implication is that the entire school estate may need to be converted at the same time; or at any rate, a significant portion of it. There may also need to be an accompanying grid upgrade. This is equivalent to undertaking a major new build, and not to be undertaken lightly; but if not tackled, the school will never boast a low carbon estate, let alone zero carbon. The deduction is that the timing and financing of such a project needs to be woven into the broader school development plan. • Stray voltage. As a company engaged in the decarbonisation of schools and colleges, we keep a close eye on emerging policy and the reaction it draws in the media, in the energy sector, in the education sector, and more broadly across the community. It’s already clear that there is a great deal of misinformation being thrown around nationally and globally, sometimes inadvertently but sometimes deliberately, by those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. This is unhelpful, but inevitable. All the more reason to raise the profile of the topic in the school community: that way, the staff and pupils will be better informed and the truth will out. Content of decarbonisation plan A good plan would lay out the technology options and impacts, for all to digest and consider, with realistic assumptions about costs, short-term impacts on the school estate while work is in progress, longer term gains, extent of carbon reductions per project, paybacks, and so on. It’s a bit like an estate masterplan by an architect, except that this one focuses on energy generation and usage and the related greenhouse gas emissions. I’d argue that given the scale of the conversion task still facing most schools, the sooner the plan is drawn up, the better. Just in case this is coming across as yet another piece of bursar-bashing, I’m not intending to be critical. Anyone working with or for the education sector must by now have noticed that bursars and school support staff in general have had a lot on their plates already this decade, with much more to come. Furthermore, I could be writing exactly the same sort of article about the situation in the UK as a whole, where we have a set of relatively ambitious national net zero targets but the detail about how we are going to meet them is still far from clear. This lack of clarity is hardly surprising. 10 or 15 years ago, hardly anybody was talking about this stuff, now – seemingly all of a sudden – it’s upon us and the IPCC has declared ‘code red for humanity’. Don’t panic! In my experience, bursars and school governing bodies like financial certainty and are correspondingly keen on planning and risk mitigation. So why the anxiety? My concern is that this is rather unfamiliar terrain, not just in schools, but nationally. We’ve reached a point where nearly everybody is aware of the need to act but most are not yet aware of the scale of the task and may be mistakenly assuming that it will all sort itself out in due course. I doubt that it will. And, of course, it’s the bursar who is going to be at the leading edge of sorting all this out and ensuring that the school fully grasps what needs to be done and what it all entails in terms of time and finance. I don’t think this is a call for bursars to panic; indeed, I can’t imagine bursars proceeding with anything other than their customary calm and air of indestructible pragmatism. But I do think it would be prudent to get a decarbonisation plan drawn up. Author Nigel Aylwin-Foster a director, ReEnergise Projects Ltd www.reenergisegroup.com