Salix Revolving Green Fund

View our new Carbon Management Plan on our dedicated webpage: University of Lincoln Carbon Management Plan

Since 2009 the Environment Team has managed an internally revolving energy efficiency fund called Salix. This relatively small fund of £125,000 is used to invest in approved energy saving technologies on campus. The savings from these projects are repaid back into the fund until the original project cost is fully repaid. These repayments are then re-invested in further projects whilst the University benefits from the ongoing energy savings long after the original investment has been repaid.

To date the revolving fund has funded 43 different projects installing a range of energy saving measures from LED lighting and controls, to insulation, new boilers, energy efficient hand driers, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning controls. The fund had been recycled over 3 times, investing over £430,000 in energy reduction projects.

In February 2015 £520k of external funding was secured to invest in an energy reduction programme on campus. The projects included:

  • Installing Coolphase air conditioning units to new teaching spaces in the Minerva Building;
  • New high efficiency boilers in Student Village;
  • Water flow restriction valves in Student Village;
  • Installing low flow push taps in various buildings across Brayford Campus;
  • LED lighting was installed in a range of buildings and external spaces around campus and at Riseholme Hall. This includes specialist LED ‘Fresnel’ type replacement lights in the TV Studios, making the studio fully LED (this follows an earlier project in 2012 which replaced all the background technical lighting to LED using similar external funding).
  • £50,000 of the funding has been used to improve our utilities sub-metering to help us identify future energy saving opportunities on campus and to help track the success of these projects.

The programme will be fully delivered by December 2016 and is expected to reduce annual energy consumption by just under 1 million kWh. This equates to reducing the University’s energy costs by about £65,000 and carbon emissions by almost 287 tonnes of CO2e every year.

Further case studies of projects delivered using Salix funding can be found below:

» TV Studio LED Lighting Project – Case Study

» Absence detection VRF wall controllers

66 controllers for Isaac Newton Building and 77 for Sarah Swift. This project funds the difference between the standard controllers and the enhanced absence detection controllers.

» Air compressor upgrade

This project involved the replacement of an old air compressor in the Science Building, with improved controls to reduce energy consumption. This has resulted in an estimated annual kWh saving of 13,462, saving £4,201 per annum.

» Energy efficient drying cabinets

The replacement of three inefficient drying cabinets used for drying glassware in our Joseph Banks Laboratories with smaller and highly insulated drying cabinets with timer controls has resulted in an estimated annual saving of 8,125 kWhs.

If you have any ideas for energy saving projects please email the Environment Team using the contacts on the right of this page.