Energy and carbon reduction

Arqiva has to use large amounts of electricity in order to operate its contracted services. This is particularly true for broadcasting where high-power transmitters are required. However, it’s worth remembering that transmission represents a very small fraction of the total electricity used in making, delivering and watching TV (probably less than 0.1 % of the total). Post-switchover the new digital TV network will consume similar amounts of electricity to the old networks but it will be more efficient as it will deliver more services.

In 2008 Arqiva developed an energy charter which commits the company to responsible energy management. From the charter we have a number of objectives:

• Use energy as efficiently as we can through good housekeeping and innovative design of buildings and equipment
• Raise the energy awareness of employees and promote an energy saving culture within the business
• Where practicable and cost effective use renewable sources of energy to power the business
• Develop our energy data collection systems to allow improved energy management and reporting

In addition we aim to achieve the Carbon Trust Standard which ensures that companies demonstrate they’re using appropriate processes to manage their energy usage.

For the Digital Switch Over project the team designed the high-power DTT network to be as energy efficient as possible. For example, the Grass Valley Paragon transmitter achieves unprecedented levels of energy efficiency, twice that of conventional Inductive Output Tube transmitters or four times that of solid-state transmitters, resulting in a reduction of as much as 75% of the operating costs over long contract periods.

We continue to consider energy consumption at the design stage for all new builds and in addition seek to influence our equipment manufacturers during their design stage to reduce energy consumption.

The use of wind turbines has to be considered carefully for our sites. Generating electricity from wind power can have variable levels of success and we could not allow any detrimental effect on services. However, we’re due to undertake a wind turbine trial at Black Hill in Central Scotland to assess the feasibility of wind power.

We’re also due to launch a feasibility study to examine whether the waste heat from transmitters could be captured and turned back into electricity.

Automatic Meters (AMs) are being installed at our transmission sites to allow us to monitor precisely the amount of energy we’re using. We have around 1,500 installed and another 1,100 in the pipeline. Although AMs do not reduce consumption on their own, they do provide data to allow better energy management. This in turn can reduce operational cost and carbon emissions.

There is scope to reduce the energy consumption in our major offices. We currently have a review programme of heating and lighting facilities, in order to reduce their energy consumption. So far this has resulted in a changeover of equipment at our Crawley Court, Emley Moor and Croydon offices.