Any recent visitors to Imperial College’s South Kensington Campus may have noticed the significant amount of building work currently going on adjacent to the Queen’s lawn. The Imperial website informs me that the Main Dining Hall is being refurbished to “improve the underutilised space”. A Main Dining Hall? None of my Imperial friends seem to know it existed! Underutilised indeed.
Anyway, the worksite barriers had posters all over them, which, upon closer inspection, were revealed to be all about Making Your University Greener. This got me rather over-excited, and visions of solar panels, roof gardens and recyclable cutlery started popping into my head. Alas, it was not to be. Instead, it was a propaganda exercise (presumably to prevent the College’s Renewable Energy Certificate going the same way as their Fairtrade status), but they had some interesting ideas.
One of the most promising new technologies is that of aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES), where boreholes are drilled into underground aquifers. In the summer, water is extracted from one borehole and used for cooling the buildings, before the warm water is emptied into a second borehole. This second borehole is then used during winter, when a heat pump is used to extract the thermal energy from the still-warm water, and this used for heating the buildings. Imperial are planning to install this “zero carbon engineering solution” in the new ‘Block L’ being built in Hammersmith. However, there are also bigger plans in place, with Fulcrum Consulting currently preparing a multi-million pound project to install ATES on the entire South Kensington site, including the museums and the Royal Albert Hall. It is hoped that this technology will deliver a 7% reduction in carbon emissions and energy consumption.
Most of the heat generated is transported round the campus in the form of steam. With 3km of pipe network, it would be easy for efficiency levels to decrease. However, Imperial are currently in the process of replacing most of the insulation, and it is hoped that 1500 tonnes of CO2 could be saved over the network.
These figures make my hope for recyclable cutlery seem pretty insignificant, but the Estates Group is asking for ideas on how to make Imperial greener still. I’m no engineer, but this ATES stuff seems like a pretty simple idea really; I might just go and have a brainstorm myself.