Accelerating estate decarbonisation at New City College

New City College (NCC) joined the London Anchor Institutions’ Network (LAIN) Green New Deal Working Group in Spring 2022. Having launched a Green Strategy a few years prior in 2020, work on environmental sustainability had begun. But whilst there was a strong ambition for NCC to become ‘greener’ and initial work had been done to quantify carbon emission baseline data and establish internal structures to drive the agenda, there was a lack of understanding of how it could be done – particularly in the area of estate decarbonisation. Here, Riikka Vihriälä, Group Head of Strategic Projects at NCC, sets out what additional progress has been made as a result of joining the LAIN.

Where is New City College now, in terms of progressing its sustainability agenda?

NCC’s understanding of estate decarbonisation has increased dramatically in the last six months. NCC’s estate includes nine sites in East London and South Essex and a language school in Bournemouth with a combined area of 110,000+ sqm. Six months ago, only one of the sites had a decarbonisation plan in the pipeline – the rest had no plans in place. There are now high-level heat decarbonisation plans for every part of the estate, with detailed plans commissioned and completion expected by March 2023. Two heat decarbonisation projects are funding ready, with a plan to submit grant funding applications in autumn 2022. Provided that the applications are successful, NCC should be in a position to have part-transitioned two sites from gas boilers to low carbon heat sources by December 2023.

What role, if any, did your membership in the LAIN Green New Deal working group play, in accelerating your progress?

The Green New Deal Working Group has been an essential forum to help NCC accelerate its progress on estate decarbonisation. Aspects of membership that have been particularly beneficial include being signposted to available resources and support, and the opportunity to share practice with other members.

The Greater London Authority’s Retrofit Accelerator – Workplaces programme has been a particularly valuable resource, as it has provided NCC with free technical advice on heat decarbonisation, as well as outline cost estimates for decarbonising the entire estate.

And we’ve learned a great deal from the work of a fellow member of the working group - the University of London - on capturing Scope 3 (i.e. indirect) emissions, which has given NCC confidence to quantify its own Scope 3 emissions. A larger proportion of these will be included in NCC’s next Streamlined Energy and Carbon Report.

What are your immediate next steps?

Decarbonising NCC’s estate will take years to implement and is dependent on significant capital grant funding being available. Salix’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme is the main vehicle that NCC is targeting for securing capital grants.

We are looking to undertake immediate change in some areas of our carbon emissions by significantly reducing our energy consumption. Behaviour change by all building users is critical to this endeavour. However, the team with the most impact on energy consumption reduction is the in-house estates team who manage the facilities on a day-to-day basis. The estates team manage the heating and cooling in our buildings and manage the work of our security and cleaning teams who have access to all parts of the building and can help take energy saving actions. Given the important role of our estates team, they were the first target group for bespoke carbon literacy training at NCC in spring 2022. This training provided a helpful starting point for reviewing the settings in existing Building Management Systems, establishing building temperature protocols and starting discussions on waste management. NCC is now seeking to further develop and extend this bespoke training for estates and facilities staff to other Anchor institutions.

NCC’s journey on estate decarbonisation is still in early stages but the progress in the last six months provides a good platform for NCC to move from planning to initial implementation. NCC is committed to reducing its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 20% by 2024 compared to our 2019/20 baseline.

Riikka Vihriälä, Group Head of Strategic Projects at New City College