What a couple of days, incredible emotion, and a real feeling of making a positive move to make a difference. A group of us were in Liverpool to see a good friend and incredible person, Dan Monk, off on the Clipper Round The World Yacht Race.
Here’s what this is all about…
I’ve been over in Amsterdam for a couple of days for the Ishares Cup which is one of the events that our Group runs. It involves extremely fast and exciting extreme 40’s racing around one of the docks there which has been incredible fun to watch. It’s not every day that you see that kind of action in a city centre!
Today felt incredibly positive as it was not only fantastic to launch CIBSE and e.on’s 100 day challenge, but to speak to other businesses about their experiences of energy management.
The challenge is about not only encouraging companies to reduce the amount of energy they use, but to be conscious overall of the resources that we so often get through in our places of work.
In Paris today for announcement about our new partnership with BT, all pretty exciting! Beautiful Extreme 40 in new BT colours assembled and floating on the river Seine – great job by our shore team. Nick Moloney and Seb Josse are here too – it’s great to see this project finally taking off. Go to the home page at www.btteamellen.com for the full story.
Back in the office, we have just been on to the CIBSE website http://www.cibse.org to sign up for the 100 Days of Carbon Clean Up Campaign. Over 100 days, we will be looking at how we can save energy in the office to ultimately reduce carbon emissions from our building.
I will be joining E.ON to help launch the event at The Energy Event 2007 at The National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham on 12th September and we hope that we can build on the success of the 2006 initiative encouraging even more companies (there were 560 last year) to join in, leading to bigger and better carbon savings.
We have just hired a Sustainability Manager who will be managing the process over the 100 days and beyond and have already put lots of posters up in the office reminding everyone to switch off lights and equipment when they are not being used – it is amazing how much difference you can make to your energy consumption just by switching things off - ensuring that chargers and power supplies in offices are unplugged when not charging can save up to 10% on energy bills!