Monday, 11 July 2011

NHS Roadmap to Sustainability & other things

We'll start with the other things, last week I visited a company in Wolverhampton who were thinking about the provision of on site generation.
We dont normally consult on renewable energy systems but in this case I thought I would use it as practice for our "Greenprints" service and to brush up on my consultancy skills.
The company were looking at energy efficiency and were thinking of installing a wind turbine on their site.
I undertook a brief review of their IT, only one server and 16 PC's but it is surprising how much energy in total they use. As to the wind turbine idea well, the site was not located in an optimum site, only 5 m/s average wind speeds and to be honest the costs of providing all their energy requirements would have required 2 x 37 m towers with 15m blades and cost in the region of £1Million, the payback would have been centuries rather than decades, not really a valid option.
We advised that their best solution would have been roof mounted solar panels.
Tomorrow, we will be attending the NHS Roadmap for Sustainability event in London, this will be an interesting event.
The NHS has enormous potential for on site generation and the use of Green IT solutions such as Greentrac and Very PC's range of computing equipment, however as with all niche and SME products it is getting over the lack of corporate clout that will prove to be the biggest stumbling block.
The NHS dont like to get out of their comfort zones, they want resolution of problems PDQ and sometimes smaller companies dont meet the NHS procurement requirements.
It will be difficult to "sell" into this environment, despite what the Government say and its high time the smaller local based outfits were given the chance to sell into the large public bodies.
We'll report back later this week on the event.

No comments:

Post a Comment