What we are doing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions

We are committed to reducing emissions from our own estate and activities by 3 per cent a year.

Managing our energy use, reducing emissions

This commitment contributes to the wider Oxfordshire Partnership target to halve all emissions from across Oxfordshire by 2030 (compared to 2008 levels).

Each year it costs around £7 million to fuel Oxfordshire County Council's corporate estate and activities:

44% of this is spent on streetlighting
37% on business travel
19% on heat and power for our buildings.

Actively managing our properties and the energy used to deliver our services across the county helped reduce our annual energy bills last year by just over £300,000.

Reducing our energy use means that emissions from our buildings and activities in 2015/16 were 10% less than in the previous year, well ahead of our 3 per cent target.

Our strategy

Our internal energy strategy (pdf format, 1.5Mb) - approved in November 2016 - sets out how we will continue to manage our energy costs and reduce associated emissions by:

reducing our energy demand (including the need to travel);
increasing our energy efficiency and
generating our own energy and exploring opportunities offered by new technologies.

Latest projects

We have installed LED lighting across our estate, with expected savings of around £78,000 per year. Lighting controls and movement sensors will help reduce these costs further.
Replacing old street lamps with more energy efficient bulbs has reduced the energy needed for street lighting by 3% - despite an increase in the number of lights.
We have worked with the Energy Saving Trust to identify opportunities to reduce fuel use and emissions from our business travel. We are now developing projects to deliver these savings.

Monitoring our emissions

Each year we report on greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the council’s properties and activities as requested by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The table below shows our emissions from our 2010/11 baseline to 2016/17, the latest reporting year.

Greenhouse gas emissions for period 1 April 2010 to 31 March 2017

	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15	2015/16	2016/17
Tonnes of CO2e
Scope 1
Gas/Kerosene/Oil/LPG/Petrol/Diesel	25,543	17,948	22,293	19,356	10,873	9,088	8,076
Scope 2
Purchased Electricity	35,358	31,865	33,264	31,100	25,228	21,619	18,398
Scope 3
Electricity Transmission & Distribution/ Business Travel/ Energy used in contractor’s office	7,140	6,015	5,894	6,567	5,588	4,855	4,210
Total Gross Emissions	68,041	55,828	61,451	57,023	41,688	35,562	30,684
Carbon offsets	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Green tariff	12,179	0	0	0	0	0	0
Renewable electricity	0	0	35	70	94	58	63
Total annual net emissions	55,862	55,828	61,416	56,953	28,924	35,505	30,621

Outside scope
Diesel				70	62	59	36
Petrol				0.07	0.23	0.15	0.32
Biomass	0	7	9	66	66	66	66
Total Outside Scope Emissions				144	128	125	102

Carbon offsets: carbon credits used to compensate for specific and accurately measured greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere
Green tariff: an agreement that an energy company purchases the equivalent amount of kWh electricity (used by Oxfordshire County Council) from renewable energy.

For a more detailed analysis of the above data, please view our greenhouse gas report (pdf format, 923Kb).

Last reviewed

19 January 2018

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