Climate Change
How Devon County Council is reducing its emissions
Devon County Council is about to undertake a review of its climate change strategy to reflect recent changes in both the policy context and viable opportunities for reducing carbon emissions.
Devon County Council's current climate change strategy entitled "A Warm Response - Our Climate Change Strategy" was approved in March 2005, following public consultation. The Council has committed itself to making a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations and to encourage all sectors in the local community to take the opportunity to reduce their emissions too. The approach for doing this is set out in our Carbon Management Programme Strategy and Implementation Plan (2007) 
(453KB - pdf help) and annual updates.
Devon County Council is committed to reducing its own organisational carbon emissions by at least 2.1% per year by:
- Running a Doing it for Devon @ Work awareness campaign, which involves our staff Environmental Promoters and includes an Energy@Work strand to encourage staff to reduce energy usage within corporate buildings. Staff are also encouraged to travel more sustainably and reduce the amount of office waste produced and to extend the @Work messages to their lives outside work;
- Running a rolling energy audit programme of corporate buildings to identify areas of energy wastage and highlight cost-effective measures to improve efficiency;
- Introducing an automatic meter reading system for main buildings, covering gas and electricity usage, as well as the heat output from the new biomass boiler;
- Installing a renewable biomass boiler (operational in April 2009) that uses woodchips to heat council buildings on the County Hall site, replacing an existing gas heating system;
- Introducing voltage optimisers in selected buildings to enable us to use electricity more efficiently;
- Rolling out loft and cavity wall insulation in selected corporate buildings;
- Installing replacement lower energy lighting systems in some corporate buildings;
- Incorporating lower energy IT systems such as ultra thin client technologies and server virtualisation;
- Rolling out (over 3 years) a programme of part night lighting for street lights in residential areas across the county, which involves switching off the lights between 12.30am and 5.30am.
Progress against these targets will be measured through the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, Defra’s greenhouse gas reporting requirement and the council’s Environmental Performance Statement.
