JISC

One of the key findings of JISC’s Suste-IT report was that tackling many of the issues that stand in the way of greening institutions, both in respect of their ICT and also in the wider agenda of transitioning to more sustainable futures, was likely to need more than the input of the ICT function working alone within an institution. It was clear from that report, and subsequent work following on from that project that the engagement and involvement of other functional groups, in particular estates, within the institution would be needed for this task.

Effective management of the estate is crucial for institutions in meeting targets for financial and environmental efficiency. Estates Directors and their staff are ideally placed to help effect change in this area.

Projects within JISC’s Institutional Innovation Programme explored cross-domain and cross-functional working on an institutional scale. The projects were able to demonstrate, in some cases, the synergies to be gained from cross-functional working, while in other cases the projects demonstrated some of the challenges to be faced when working in this way.

Projects that addressed estates issues, sustainable development or Green ICT included:

• Location Independent Working (University of Coventry) – investigated the “institutionalising” of flexible working;
• Low Carbon ICT (University of Oxford) – Institution wide implementation of wake-on-LAN and PC powerdown solutions to effect real energy savings;
• Energy conservation in computing intensive learning environments (University of Bolton) - new solutions to the problems of power consumption and heat control in computer classrooms and server rooms using a systematic approach to innovation called TRIZ;
• iBorrow (Canterbury Christ Church University) – Tracking of mobile devices in flexible learning spaces;
• Reduction and re-use of energy in institutional data centres (University of Hertfordshire) – Re-engineering of existing data centres;
• Sustainable ICT Service Provision (SISP) (University of East Anglia) – Integrated estates/IT approaches to energy reduction;
• Web-Based Interactive Visualisation Modelling Platform to Effect Participative & Collaborative Planning & Design of Future Learning Spaces (University of Sheffield) – Visualisation tool for learning spaces.

Anticipated outcomes from this strand of work include:

• Increased understanding among Estates Directors and their staff about the potential of ICT to help solve estates based issues;
• Increased uptake of best practice and innovative approaches in the convergence of ICT and estates issues across the sector;
• Better-developed linkages between estates, IT and others, both within institutions and across sector bodies.

The objectives of this strand Strand include:

• The development of capacity of the Estates function to support the development of a low carbon ICT infrastructure within further and higher education;
• Demonstration of innovative opportunities to link ICT with Estates activities to create both business and environmental benefit;
• The development and dissemination of practical examples of Estates-led innovation.

The projects within this programme funded under this strand are:

Project	Details
Computer Room Efficiency Improvement Imperial College	It is a challenging project to try to retrofit solutions into the existing facility. So far two computer rooms have achieved PUE (Power Utilization Effectiveness) of 1.52 and 1.32 respectively. Proposed project will aim to consider different methods ("cold aisles", energy recover system, temperature adjustment and control) and model different scenarios and adverse effects of each in order to produce a feasible design to reduce PUE of the computer rooms. We anticipate a 5% reduction in power consumption.
Display Energy for Laboratory Tracking and Action (DELTA) University of Bradford	This proposal is concerned with applying ICT technologies to address the issues of energy consumption in laboratories, and especially those associated with fume cupboard ventilation systems. This is a major issue for Estates departments as a single fume cupboard can consume £1500-3000 of energy a year. The core of the proposal is the development of a pilot implementation of a laboratory energy information system, involving display of ventilation-related energy consumption data at fume cupboard and laboratory level, and automatic reporting of performance to key users. This will be build on previous experience of this in non-laboratory buildings during the Ecoversity project. The impact of the scheme on user behaviour and fume cupboard energy use will be monitored in detail.
Greening the Data Centre Worcester College of Technology	This project will see the introduction of an Estates-led innovative solution to handle the heat output from the organisations Data Centre. By ensuring heat emissions are disposed of in a more ‘green’ and sustainable way the college expects that that this would be a significant part of meeting their Strategic Objective to reduce overall emissions by 8% by 2012.
Heat and light by timetable Leeds Metropolitan University	project which integrates the separate heating and lighting control and timetabling systems to allow timetable information on room use and allocation to be used to more precisely control the provision of heat and power to classroom accommodation. The outcome of the project will be a specification of the data and processes required to extract data regarding room booking and usage from a timetabling system, and use that data to derive a heating and lighting control system in which the settings of heating and other environmental control systems are programmed according to actual usage patterns.
iBuilding University of Central Lancashire	iBuilding will see the introduction of an ICT system to facilitate communication with staff and students as to the energy consumption of the UCLan campus. The system will be in the form of a dashboard that will share data with users, captured by automatic meter reading (AMR) equipment, and enable users to drill down to data at a building level. The dashboard will enable two way communication between Facilities Management (in particular the team responsible for Environment and Sustainability) and staff and students.