Kingston & Sutton Councils Case Study

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Background

In June 2019 Kingston Council had declared a climate emergency, triggering a range of projects and initiatives with the aim of making the borough carbon neutral by 2038.

To look at this initiative from an IT perspective the Council worked with environmental consultancy Px3 to undertake an audit of the power saved by moving from the old desktop devices to the new, more energy efficient Acer Chromebooks and VDI. 

The study also looked at the carbon emissions saved by the huge reduction in commuting and from the likely extended usage of the Chromebooks over an additional two years.

The Findings

Ewen Anderson, Lead Consultant and Founder at P2zero noted: “We benchmarked a 32% reduction in energy from the move to VDI and Acer Chromebooks. If you combine this with the reduced commuting from more than 95% working remotely you would need 3,700 acres of mature forest, roughly one and a half times the size of the local Richmond Park, to remove the equivalent amount of pollution from the atmosphere.”

Confirming that the benefits apply to the economy as well as the environment, David Grasty (Corporate Head of Digital Transformation, Kingston and Sutton Councils) also reported an immediate and direct cost saving “we estimate about a £40k reduction in our annual electricity bill just going from those old devices to “state of the art” ones”.

Conclusions

The last word on the solution goes to Jason Sam-Fat, Commercial Manager for the Shared Digital Service at Kingston and Sutton commented “We presented the findings at our last climate emergency meeting. It was the first time we’d had such detailed information about our carbon footprint and it was really good that IT had significantly more information about emissions than any other department and a clear roadmap for the future”.

Note - this project was completed by P2zero staff working at Px3 Ltd prior to the establishment of P2zero by their professional services team.