About us
HM Treasury’s environmental commitments
29 July 2011
Foreword from the Economic Secretary to the Treasury
The Prime Minister has committed us to being the greenest Government ever and as a Government we are determined to fully take on the challenge that climate change presents.
As the UK’s economics and finance ministry, the Treasury will be at the heart of meeting that ambition. We have an important role to play to make sure that the UK makes the transition to low carbon growth in an efficient way. Our work through the Treasury Environment Network supports policy action across Government to secure this ambition.
We are also committed to leading by example as a Government, and as a department we share this commitment to improve our sustainability credentials. The Treasury has a good track record of this, and in the last year alone we have reduced our carbon footprint across the Treasury estate by 14.2%, surpassing the 10% reduction target for Whitehall departments, and helping support a pan-government reduction of 13.8 %.
Building on this good work, we also need to consider the impact we each have on the environment through our actions in the workplace. This strategy sets out the range of ways we are reducing our impact on the environment, in terms of the building and how we use it. It is a key element of how we plan to meet our targets but it is by no means the end. We will continue to challenge our departmental performance – the recent re-launch of an expanded Green Champions network at 1 Horse Guards Road is part of that.
Thank you all for your ongoing contribution to meeting our environmental targets, and I hope we can continue the impressive work of ensuring the UK is a world leader in sustainability, and the Treasury can be a leading example to the rest of Government
Economic Secretary to the Treasury: Justine Greening MP
HM Treasury's HQ energy use
The data represents usage from electricity, heat and gas.
The on-line tool displays real-time energy information that is updated every five seconds. The tool provides an at-a-glance view of energy use over the last 24 hours.
The on-line tool has three main purposes. First, we want to be transparent about the amount and costs of the energy we use. Second, we want the tool to provide a further incentive to reduce our energy use. Third, we want the tool to demonstrate how easily others can use real-time information to make their own savings.
The Treasury’s Climate Change Plan
The Climate Change Act 2008 set carbon budgets, which are carbon targets for the UK each covering a five year period. The Climate Change Plan, published in March 2010, sets out the Treasury’s role in delivering carbon budgets and adapting to climate change. Note that this plan was published under the previous Government
The document is available below in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe website. For alternative ways to read PDF documents and further information on website accessibility visit the HM Treasury accessibility page.
Points to note about the energy usage display
Carbon conversion factors of grid electricity and gas are based on Defra’s 2009 guidance. The factors in use are 0.18358 per kWh for gas and 0.54055 per kWh for electricity.
Prices come from the latest HM Treasury energy bills, which for Gas average out at 4.82p per unit and for electricity average out at 9.76p per unit. The gas volumetric measurement is converted to kWh using the meter correction factors and calorific values supplied by the utility company. These may be subject to change.
Because we have used the pulse-outputs of electrical and gas meters there are certain assumptions we need to make in order to generate a real-time value. The pulses from the meters actually signify a volume of gas or an amount of energy, and we need to determine a flow of gas or electrical power from the pulses. Since at any given moment you are always between one pulse and the next, you have to guess, to a certain extent, when the next pulse will come in order to estimate the actual flow or power. The accuracy of the guess depends on how close together the pulses are, so at busy times you hardly need to guess at all. The pulses from the main electricity meter come every 100 watt-hours, which is enough to let us overcome the issue by counting the number of pulses in a five second period and applying a calculation to smooth successive readings into a rate, even at night. The main gas meter pulses once for each cubic metre consumed, which for properly variable loads could leave us guessing for quite a while before the next pulse comes.
We use an ‘exponential moving average’ calculation to generate the real-time value, which allows us to display a value that is as close-to-right as possible; the values go up in time with increases in actual use, but lag behind sudden reductions. The downside of this is that if you added up all the real-time values that the teaser shows every five seconds, over time it would be shown to over-report slightly. This inaccuracy in the real-time data is strongest when high gas use drops quickly (as when the main boilers shut down, which happens several times a day). This distortion in the real-time data does not introduce any inaccuracies into the archive data, and we will report on the exact degree of error introduced if there is interest in this.
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