Latest from YEP!

Monday 14 March 2011

The YEP! Project are gearing up to present their energy saving recommendations to the school Governors and to pupils in assemblies. We are going to introduce an energy saving campaign into the school. This will make our school site much more eco-friendly to the environment and also reduce the amount that school pays for electricity and gas.

The YEP! Project was started in October 2010 and involves nine pupils from Year 8.Each pupil forms part of the school's Energy Management team – Katie and Lucy are the Project Managers and are in charge of a team of IT or Marketing team. Every pupil went through a strict interview for a place in The YEP! Project. Since their appointment, the YEP! pupils have taken part in a training day where they learned how to survey a school and read the gas and electricity meters. The pupils have carried out a survey of the main block that included: heating, lighting, temperatures and other electrical appliances.

Some of our findings on the survey day are below:

• 15 out of 30 rooms had lights left on.
• Computer monitors are regularly left on even though there is no one in the room.
• The Main Hall costs over £2000 to light every year.
• Some of the radiators are too hot to touch and people open windows to cool the rooms down.

As a school, we released the equivalent of 522,966.54 party balloons of CO2 into the air per year – an absolutely HUGE number! We would need to plant 2139 trees to cope with all that carbon dioxide.

To help to reduce this amount we are going to present our results to the Governors and ask for their support with some of our recommendations e.g. changing light bulbs to the most energy efficient type and insulating pipe work to radiators to ensure that no heat is lost.

All the pupils of the school will also be involved in our energy campaign – WATCH THIS SPACE!

Related Links:

• YEP!
• Severn Wye Energy Agency