Green Gown Awards 2014 - Carbon Reduction - University of Salford - Finalist

State of the art carbon savings

The ‘Octave’ is the University of Salford’s state of the art virtual reality suite. At its most extensive, it can present an eight-sided projected environment that completely surrounds the participants. The suite was designed nearly 6 years ago and powered by 16 workstations and operating 24/7 365 days a year.

Earlier last year, a joint project between the Research Centre, external partners Paradigm AV and the University’s own Estates department enabled upgrade of the suite making it much faster but with significant energy savings.

The project is estimated to payback in 7-8 months with savings of £25,000 per year. The carbon savings from the project are approximately 70 tonnes per annum. These savings have been realised alongside increased capability and greater flexibility of the system itself.

This is a fantastic example of partnership between academic and professional services to develop unconventional solutions to realise significant carbon savings with highly specialised equipment.

Top 3 learnings

1 Generating internal partnerships between Estates and academic/ research departments can elicit significant carbon reduction opportunities
2 Promoting significant carbon reduction projects such as this internally can prompt additional sustainable behaviour changes and action
3 The upgrade pathways used in this project were bespoke but could be applied to other highly specialised technology on the University of Salford campus and beyond.

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