WHAT WE ARE DOING
Cornwall College is committed to protecting the environment and encourages students and staff to improve their quality of life while protecting and conserving the earth’s systems.
100 trees saved by students - Cool Earth
Cool Earth is an international rainforest charity which operates within the BEIT research unit on the Camborne campus. With the help of 145,000 supporters, the charity currently protects endangered forest in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo.
As well as supporting the college's sustainability and diversity work Cool Earth provides internships to graduates, guest lectures at four faculties and is developing a programme with the College's study centre in Borneo. Cool Earth also runs a carbon proofing service which enabled Cornwall College Camborne to protect over 100 trees in the name of its students for its Fresher's Fair, helping to cut global CO2 emissions.
For more information visit: www.coolearth.org 
This past year boilers have started to look attractive. With 14.7 and 116.5 tons of carbon saved in the examples below, we think these look positively stunning
Duchy College Building Management System
Duchy College Stoke Climsland has eight separate boiler rooms providing heating and hot water to the majority of the campus. They are all of varying age and efficiency with each one having a different control system ranging from a simple time clock to a complex programmer requiring an engineer to visit with a laptop to make any changes. As a result making any changes to the heating systems to match our times of occupancy or varying temperature requirements has been difficult to manage and as a result we have been wasting energy.
As part of a project funded by an interest free energy saving loan we have upgraded our existing control systems to a modern Building Management System (BMS). This enables the heating controls to be accessed via the internet from any location to make adjustments to times of operation and temperatures.
In addition the system has an optimiser, which by measuring the outside temperature calculates how early the heating needs to go on to reach a comfortable temperature when the building is occupied and how soon it can switch off at the end of the day and the building remain warm enough.
The annual gas consumption prior to installation was 1,219,053kWh, since the installation this has dropped to 1,139,184kWh, a saving of 79,869kWh or 14.7tons of CO2. At current gas prices this is a saving of £2,795. After correcting for the colder weather this winter the saving is £2,879.
Cornwall College Camborne, Penhaligon Gas conversion
The Penhaligon building at Camborne was originally constructed as the South West Electricity Board headquarters and control centre. Not surprisingly heating and air conditioning were all electric with very large electricity bills, there being no electricity bill to be paid by SWEB.
With money provided by the Skills Funding Agnecy we removed the enormous electric immersion heaters and replaced them with modern gas boilers and controls.
The annual electricity consumption dropped by 342,207kWh compensated by an increase in gas consumption of 378826kWh. The increase in kWh as a result of colder weather. However as gas produces far less CO2 than grid electricity and costs less per unit the annual reduction in CO2 was 116.5 tons and a financial saving of £20,962 was made.
