Energy saving decisions at leisure centres are working out

Wirral Council’s ongoing commitment to leading the way locally in reducing energy costs and damaging emissions from its own buildings is starting to produce results.

The council has invested £350,000 on energy-efficiency measures at its Active Wirral leisure centres over the last 12 months in a project that is not only delivering reductions in cost and energy usage, but also a prestigious national accolade.

Wirral Council recently took the award for ‘Best Innovation or Demand Management Initiative’ at the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) awards in Bristol for the collaborative work it has carried out in beginning to decarbonise its own buildings.

Leisure centres - all of which are large, multi-use spaces operating for long periods of time with air-conditioned fitness suites and some with heated swimming pools – were an obvious focus for a project that aimed to improve energy efficiency and reduce costs associated with energy.

Excluding the street lighting network, the council’s Active Wirral facilities combined accounted for 41% of the council’s corporate electricity usage. 53% of Wirral Council’s total gas consumption and 49% of all emissions generated by electricity and gas usage came from the operation of Active Wirral leisure facilities.

The council has a wider, ambitious programme of decarbonisation of its estate underway that is largely dependent on grant funding through the government’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS). 

Supported by the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCRCA) and NW net zero hub, Wirral bid for £12m of grant funding under PSDS to decarbonise 11 buildings. However, due to limited funds, Wirral was only allocated an initial award of around £900,000, which will allow the council to carry decarbonisation works on Landican Cemetery and Wirral Country Park to take place in the coming months.

However, the process of addressing the challenges presented by operating leisure facilities has already been started with a project aimed at delivering energy reductions across the centres was carried out thanks for a capital investment from the council of £350,000. 

Through a combination of in-house knowledge and expertise, research into best practice from other areas and operational insights provided by staff working in our leisure services every day, a number of ‘quick wins’ were identified to invest that capital funding in order to make short-term and longer-term savings and improvements.

Actions such as installing pool covers to reduce heat loss from the swimming pools when they are not in use were an obvious way to reduce heating costs - by preventing evaporation, pool covers retain the heat generated by the pool's heating system. 

Repairing solar panels, installing low flow showers and improving the awareness of energy efficiency amongst staff were other interventions, as were providing more investment for ongoing planned preventative maintenance and optimising building management systems to ensure that equipment was running as efficiently and to demand as possible.

It also achieved over one and a half times its emissions reduction target to save 335 tonnes CO2e contributing to 23 per cent of the Council’s total emissions reduction target for 2023/24.

In terms of monetary impact, the project is also on target to have the initial investment repaid in around 18 months and the forecast - if the results so far are maintained – is a cost saving of £1.23 million by 2028. 

The achievements clearly resonated with the APSE award judges, who named Wirral Council winner of Best Innovation or Demand Management Initiative award at a special dinner at Bristol’s Mercure Grand Hotel on September 12th.