School energy and community challenge

I spent most of this morning on one of my favourite duties, which is sitting on the funding panel for the Green Community Challenge Fund. This is a scheme that I helped to establish, allocating £75,000 a year to community groups and similar organisations in slabs of up to £10,000 to set up environmental projects and particularly those with a carbon-reduction theme. This is the second year of the Fund and it's great to hear about projects that we funded a year ago coming to fruition.

I don't want to break the results of the current round before the decisions are official and the organisations have been notified, but suffice it to say that we agreed to support half a dozen schemes mainly focused this time around community agriculture and local food production and use.

One which was funded in the last round is just getting going and I went to a project meeting yesterday. It's a collaborative project between Resource Futures and Sustainable Redland (with extra support from the Council) which aims to cut energy use in schools by training the pupils up to be auditors - turning off lights, monitoring temperature levels, switching off computers and the like. It will be operating in 13 schools in the coming weeks and the aim is to cut energy use by 10% and demonstrate how easy it is, while the children learn about sustainability and do some maths along the way.

Schools are about the only part of the Council's activities where energy use (and so carbon emissions) is still rising. This is partly due to longer school days and partly due to the increase in IT equipment, among other factors. With energy prices set to keep on rising (unless you're with a renewable supplier like me!), this is going to become an ever-growing pressure on school budgets and it's vital that they act sooner rather than later. A 10% cut in energy bills in any school pays for lots of new library books - or even extra staff in a large school.

The idea is for the project to come up with a scheme that can be rolled out to all schools in the city, saving them money on energy bills and the Council (and therefore, taxpayers) money in carbon tax. It feels like a really strong project team and I'm quite excited to see what comes back.