October has been an exciting month for Nottingham City Council’s Energy Projects Team whose LED lighting project to upgrade the city’s heritage sites won two awards.
The team won the Coping with Climate Change award at last week’s Nottingham Post Environment Awards. This comes a few weeks after the team won Best Commercial Energy Project at the national Clean Energy Awards.
Wollaton Hall is one of the first heritage buildings in the country to modernise its lighting. Although far cheaper to run and better for the environment, LED lighting has not been popular for such buildings due to the desire to preserve the traditional character of heritage sites. The lighting scheme in the hall uses the very latest technology available for LED lights which ensures the building has retained its heritage atmosphere.
The upgrade has reduced the Hall’s energy consumption for lighting by 88%, saving 31 tonnes of CO2 a year and £5,700 a year on energy bills. After a successful pilot the lighting upgrade will also be rolled out to Nottingham City Council’s other heritage sites, Newstead Abbey and Nottingham Castle.
Councillor Alan Clark, Portfolio Holder for Energy and Sustainability, said: “The awards this year had a fantastic line-up of local projects striving to make Nottingham greener and more sustainable and we were honoured to be among them.
“Local authorities are high energy consumers and at Nottingham City Council we have a programme of work to ensure that we have a more sustainable approach to our consumption, generating green energy where we can and using the latest technology to reduce our energy demand. It is a great recognition for the Energy Projects Team to have their project announced as the winner in these fantastic local awards “