100 Parliament Street, London

What is HMRC doing to reduce energy consumption in 100 Parliament Street?

Our 100 Parliament Street building receives heat via the Whitehall district heating system, which serves other Government HQ Sites locally. The site has a mixture of naturally ventilated and mechanically cooled offices and rooms.

Display Energy Certificates (DECs) indicate the energy performance of a building. Each allocates a numerical indicator which relates to the annual CO₂ emissions from the building - the lower the numerical indicator, the better the energy efficiency of that building. An energy performance operational rating of 100 would be typical for an historic building of 100 Parliament Street’s type so the current rating of 83 is good.

The rating was improved from 84 in 2008 by reducing the building’s core temperature from 23° C to 21° C.

What is HMRC doing to reduce energy consumption by 10% across the HMRC estate?

HMRC has a complex and disparate estate, from listed historical buildings to ‘60s office blocks and new builds. Surveys are taking place on a building by building basis to identify no-cost and low-cost ways to reduce our carbon emissions. These include voltage optimisation; temperature adjustments similar to 100 Parliament Street and replacing halogen lights with low energy LED alternatives.

What other measures is HMRC taking to reduce carbon emissions?

In addition to reducing carbon emissions from our offices, HMRC has also focused on reducing emissions from business travel. We have already exceeded our government target to reduce carbon emissions from road vehicles by 15% by 2010/11 (against a baseline of 2005/6) and current data for 2009/10 shows we have reduced emissions from road vehicles by a total of 36.43%. (These figures include both HMRC and its executive agency, the Valuation Office Agency).

How do you calculate the CO₂ emissions from a unit of electricity and district heating used?

The government produces conversion factors that describe the typical carbon impact of different energy sources. These allow us to take the electricity use (in kWh) and district heating use (in kWh) , and calculate the approximate carbon dioxide emissions, normally measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (kgCO₂e). We have used the conversion factors from Defra's 2011 Guidelines. The factors in use at each particular building are noted below in the Assumptions section.

Why is there no scale on the small real time graph?

We made a small, simple real time display graph (we call it a 'teaser') so that organisations can communicate about real-time energy use on their homepages. The intention of the teaser is to present very simple, somewhat intriguing information that attracts browsing users to the profile page (this page!). It has to work in a very small area, and it can't support detailed enquiry.

The building profile page where you are now is where the real information lives. This is where we provide much more detail for those who have the time and inclination to learn more.

How much does this organisation pay for its energy?

Prices come from the latest energy bills for the HM Revenue & Customs, which are noted below in the Assumptions section. These are of course subject to change, and will be updated by the organisations themselves as tariffs are revised.

How do you get this data from the buildings?

Getting this energy data out of some buildings is harder than others, but in general the buildings contain a small low-power computer which takes very frequent readings from the electricity and district heating meters and stores the data. Every few seconds, this computer sends the information it has collected to a server. Your browser will then ask this server for the data it needs in order to draw the real-time detailed graphs and website teasers. The energy impact of this process is very low, and it gets lower with each additional site that uses the system.

Why isn't the graph updating?

Occasionally the data connection goes down and the graph isn't automatically updated with the current information. This is nothing to worry about. During these periods, all of the data is saved and we will fill in the graphs with the backdated information as soon as possible.

What do the colours on the graph mean?

The colours in the graph show approximately how the current level of usage would lead to a given Operational Rating – as set out on a Display Energy Certificate (DEC) – if the performance for a given moment carried on for an entire year. This goes from dark green for ‘A’ to red for ‘G’. We calibrate this using input data used for generating the building’s DEC, together with information relating to 'normal' buildings of its type.

Why are you using these units and what do they mean?

We provide three different measures of the energy used: the amount of energy, its monetary cost, and the carbon impact of the energy used.

Energy use is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh), which are the standard ‘units’ of a home energy bill (1kWh is the amount of electricity used by leaving ten 100W light bulbs on for one hour).
For electricity this number represents the amount of energy that flows into a building through the meter. For gas it is the amount of energy that is theoretically available by burning all the gas. For district heating it reflects a flow of temperature over time, after the heat produced by burning the fuel has been transported to the meter. So these numbers mean very different things - this is one reason that we try to use 'units per hour' when combining them. Really it would be better not to combine them at all, because it can lead to confusion

Monetary cost is calculated using the costs per 'unit' for each utility in every building. The figures used are noted below in the Assumptions section.

The carbon impact is measured in kg of CO₂e (the e stands for equivalent) which takes other climate-affecting gasses into account besides carbon dioxide.

Can you show data from the transport emissions of this organisation/ building?

Data of CO₂ emissions created by transport used by organisations is very interesting and powerful data to show here. We are working on ways to display and reduce the transport impacts of different organisations, and you will see some of the products of this work on these pages very soon.