What the council is doing

The county council has been working over a number of years to improve energy efficiency, include sustainable energy in its newly designed buildings, and promote renewable energy installations where appropriate. The examples on this page show what we have done and what we are currently doing in different areas.

Walton and Holymoorside Primary School – Derbyshire’s first sustainable school building including: high energy efficiency, rainwater harvesting, passive solar design to reduce heat demand and maximise light into the building.
Hady Primary School – photovoltaic cells installed on school extension to generate electricity to power the school.
Herbert Strutt Primary School - the planning and development of an energy self-sufficient school in Belper with integrated renewable technologies to generate energy electricity and sell surpluses to the grid - possibly a ground source heat pump; a wind turbine; the installation of photovoltaic cells – the former provides heating in winter and cooling in summer; the latter two generate electricity.
Markham Environmental Technology and Training Centre - state of the art flagship sustainable building with business germination units, which includes wind turbine, photovoltaic cells and wood fuelled boiler.
Markham Willows - planned plantation of short rotation willow coppice which will feed the wood fuelled boiler mentioned above.
The installation of a wind turbine at Shipley Country Park - to generate electricity to supplement the energy load required by Shipley’s operation.
Street lighting in Derbyshire runs on renewably generated electricity - all street lighting under the control of the council is run on renewable energy. We are seeking further efficiency savings to reduce the use of electricity for these installations (dimming; electronic ballast retrofit to reduce energy use and development of a street lighting management system using photocells – the latter could save half a million kilowatts per year).
The council has signed the Nottingham declaration on climate change - it charges signatories to reduce carbon emissions through a planned programme of energy efficiency, renewables and community leadership.
Derbyshire County Council has joined the Carbon Trust’s Local Authority Carbon Management Programme - areas for investigation to reduce carbon emissions from the authority’s operation within this scheme include buildings, street lighting, waste management/recycling, staff travel and fleet management.
The setting up of an ‘invest to save fund’ with a £200k grant from the Salix organisation which has been matched 100 per cent from county council funds. Projects to benefit include cavity wall insulation for homes for older people; power-perfector current adjusters on a previous six-month trial at Chatsworth Hall showed an eight per cent reduction in power requirement. Others are planned for installation at County Hall, John Hadfield House, Chesterfield library, Buxton Area Education Office; eight energy surveys of council buildings; installation of intelligent metering to record electrical usage every half hour; installation of auto-switch-off mechanisms for computer servers.
Ongoing replacement of cathode ray tube computer screens (these consume 130 watts in operation and 5w in standby) by flat screen units which reduce electricity consumption (these consume 35w in operation and 2w in standby).
Use of reflective traffic signs – to be phased in on replacement and in new schemes.
The development of a corporate waste matrix to determine the types and amounts of waste the council produces in order to control and reduce, re-use and recycle these resources.
Staff car share scheme - provision of cycle and clothes lockers and the provision of showers to encourage staff cycling. The car-share scheme is now part of the car-share Derbyshire scheme (opens in a new window)
Energy and water monitoring and targeting scheme - a majority of the authority’s buildings are registered on this scheme to identify, investigate and rectify spikes in usage of these resources and save energy in the long term.
Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Local Authorities’ Energy Partnership (LAEP) – the county council has been a member since 1996. All 19 local authorities in the two counties are members. The benefits are joint working, support, information exchange, best practice, networking and we have two flagship projects running currently: Everbody’s Talking About Climate Change and the Sustainable Procurement Project.
Taking part in DEFRA’s climate change challenge through LAEP to raise awareness of climate change and shifting attitudes positively for empowerment to action to everyone in Derbyshire (and Nottinghamshire). Everybody’s talking about climate change (opens in a new window) was launched in March 2007.
‘An Inconvenient Truth’ has been shown to staff recently. We hope to repeat showings for staff who missed this film the first time around. This raises awareness of climate change as part of the Local Authorities Carbon Management Programme. Copies of ‘An inconvenient Truth’ now held by all county libraries are available on loan to the general public free of charge.