Wrexham County Borough Council

Key stats

• £22,000 in potential cost reductions for fiscal year 2023/2024
• Expected annual reduction of ten metric tons of CO2e
• Manages 70 schools, used by 20,000 students

Overview

Smarter building management key to cutting carbon

The UK government aims to transition public sector facilities, including schools, to carbon net-zero by 2050—and local authorities are being tagged in to help achieve that goal. These organisations have control over housing, transport, and energy use and can be hugely influential in generating momentum and resetting sustainability expectations.

Like other local councils across the UK, Wrexham County Borough Council (WCBC) is tasked with meeting ambitious carbon reduction commitments. WCBC itself wants to be carbon neutral by 2030. To do so it must optimise energy use across its estate, enable smart building management, and reduce travel costs by enabling remote management of IT resources.

Wrexham is the fourth-largest city in Wales, with a regional population of 135,000. WCBC manages 70 schools, delivering education for over 20,000 students. This estate currently accounts for 56% of the carbon emissions resulting from the energy usage at all the Council’s buildings, excluding Council houses. A planned upgrade of the schools’ networks provided a valuable and opportune chance to rethink the approach to building management.

Challenge

Optimising energy use across the school estate

Wales has major plans to upgrade its education sector. The country launched an updated national curriculum in September 2022, and is investing in new, digital infrastructure to allow all schools to connect with online platforms. The goal is to enable more mobile and digital learning experiences and for educators to have the flexibility to find innovative approaches to teaching and learning.

A consistent, reliable network across all schools helps WCBC meet national standards of connectivity and access for students, faculty, and visitors alike. Schools are able to connect to the Welsh government’s national platform, Hwb, which provides easy access to teaching and learning tools such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google Classroom. Individual schools then choose apps or determine device policies that best match local needs.

Max Wheelock, Climate Change and Carbon Reduction Officer at WCBC, says such infrastructure investments must now adopt a sustainability lens. The carbon reduction team wanted to run a proof of concept at selected primary schools to understand how electricity consumption resulting from the IT network infrastructure could be optimised. WCBC wanted to move away from the “always on” state to reduce unnecessary overnight power usage, costs, and carbon emissions.

Wheelock stated that the Council has made a commitment to decrease carbon emissions from Council buildings annually and to construct low- or zero-carbon buildings.

The longer-term goal would be to deploy smart building management systems across the schools’ estate.

Solution

Proactive control of the network infrastructure

The use of Cisco Meraki products establishes consistent network management throughout WCBC schools. The solution, designed and implemented alongside Cisco partner CAE Technology Services, involved 1,143 Meraki MR Wi-Fi 6 access points and more than 250 Meraki MS switches. Schools can be managed from a central location via the Meraki dashboard application programming interface (API).

Central visibility and control allow WCBC to power up or power down switch ports and access points. Using Meraki MS port schedules, WCBC can set recurring time-based activations. Rather than running continuously, a school’s network will now start-up at 7:30 am and switch off at 8:30 pm.

The Meraki dashboard API provides access to the school network, allowing centralised visibility, control, and management. As the network is programmatically configured rather than by human touch, there is no configuration drift or inconsistency. Each site is standardised, making support and fixes much easier.

In the event of a network issue, the Meraki dashboard allows WCBC’s network service team to drill down to a specific device. The team can be proactive and agile, getting ahead of network issues before they impact the school to avoid unnecessary service journeys.

The approach was first assessed and refined in five schools before being rolled out across the region.

Once the configuration templates were in place it was simply a matter of putting in the new hardware and stripping out the old. The new network was up and running the next morning, with no downtime for the school. WCBC had 70 schools on the network within just a six-month period.

Results

There is potential for greater cumulative carbon and financial savings from extending the technology across all WCBC schools and other corporate buildings. The Meraki and partner engagement has also provided insights into the hourly air quality, noise level, temperature, and humidity in teaching spaces across schools.

Max Wheelock

Climate Change and Carbon Reduction Officer, Wrexham County Borough Council

Cutting energy use by 52%

The impact is transformational. Today, teachers across Wrexham can deliver lessons from anywhere on the school grounds. A consistent, safe, and reliable network means schools can access the national teaching platforms or choose their own digital tools. WCBC has around 20,000 tablet and laptop devices, including both Apple and Windows OS connecting to the network; each device that connects to the network is identified, registered, and kept secure.

Progress on sustainability targets is substantial.

Using WiserWatts, an integrated energy management platform from Cisco partner CAE Technology Services, it is estimated that there has been a 52% reduction in overnight Wi-Fi electricity use within the school estate, with annual carbon emissions expected to decrease by ten metric tons of CO2e. Additionally, this reduction in energy consumption is projected to result in potential savings of up to £22,000 for fiscal year 2023/2024, based on the current unit cost of electricity.

Over the lifespan of the hardware, significant cost savings can be achieved by continuing to reduce energy consumption and optimise port utilisation. Optimising the availability of the network can help reduce waste and further enhance cost-efficiency, and Wheelock says this is only the start.

There is potential for greater cumulative carbon and financial savings from further extending the technology across WCBC schools and other corporate buildings. The Meraki MT sensors, for example, provide insights into the hourly air quality, noise level, temperature, and humidity in teaching spaces across schools. This has helped to identify when these spaces are over cooled or over heated during operating hours, enabling WCBC to make decisions about how best to control and regulate the temperature. And the WCBC can manage those configurations remotely, eliminating the need to travel across the schools’ estate making manual adjustments.

In the future, building management systems may enable WCBC to dynamically adjust heating and cooling across schools throughout the day. The Council is also investigating how sensors added to the Meraki network could monitor a room’s usage and automatically close off unused parts of the school. Lights on community sports fields can be kept on later and switched off automatically—further cutting down on energy costs.

The lessons learnt across the 70 schools can be applied to the management of other buildings within the Council’s estate as well, and to reiterate Wheelock’s sentiment, this is only the beginning.