Bassetlaw District Council, Worksop, England

Bassetlaw District Council (BDC) is the local authority for the Worksop, Retford, Harworth and Tuxford areas in England. The council is providing its public buildings, including local museums, offices, and schools, for the ALCHEMAI pilot scheme. This will create a case study for other local authorities and show that net zero can be reached in a low-risk manner.

Robert Craighead, Climate Change Manager says, “We have a handful of buildings and projects that we know we want to decarbonise, but we’re not sure how. We hope to find out how we can best mobilise decarbonisation-style projects, incentivise further investment across the asset pool, and do this in a cost-effective manner.

“Decarbonisation of assets is a very big and tall order for any organisation to make. Through ALCHEMAI we hope to mobilise decarbonisation of our buildings on a larger scale than we’d ever be able to achieve otherwise.”

Elemental Power is using data collected from BDC’s portfolio of sites to feed into EPOCH, a modelling engine which rapidly simulates millions of feasible energy upgrade scenarios to pinpoint the most cost-effective sustainable solutions for a business site or portfolio. Digital twins – virtual copies of each local energy system – have been created for each of the BDC buildings, which establish operational emissions, capital expenditure, operational costs, and payback timelines for any energy upgrade scenario. We can then recommend cost effective interventions that can reduce carbon and improve the performance and comfort of the buildings.