Having a clear goal to reduce your energy consumption can help you take action and measure progress.
Energy Sparks allows you to set an annual target to reduce your electricity, gas or storage heater usage. We then provide you with progress reports to help you monitor how you are getting on, as well as advice about how to achieve your target.
Setting and revising your targets
We will prompt you to set your first energy saving target and then will send an annual reminder to review and set a new target for the year ahead.
You can set individual targets for your electricity, gas and storage heater energy consumption. The targets are set as a percentage reduction of your usage compared to how much you used over the last twelve months. For example a 5% reduction in electricity would be using 5% less electricity over the next year compared to last year.
Where we don’t have enough data to assess your performance you will not be able to set a target for that fuel type.
Monitoring your progress
Once you have set a target we will provide reminders to review your progress on your dashboard and in your regular email alerts.
We also provide you with:
- an overview of your current progress against your targets
- suggested activities and actions to help you stay on track
- a detailed progress report for each target that provides more information about your current progress and future consumption targets over the next twelve months
Taking action to achieve your target
We support you in helping to achieve your targets by:
- providing regular reminders to review your energy usage and progress
- suggesting ways to reduce consumption via your dashboard, weekly alerts and reminders
- suggesting activities for pupils to help you engage the whole school
- providing more insight through our detailed analysis of your energy usage
How do we calculate your target energy consumption?
When you have set a target to reduce your energy consumption we analyse your data to determine how much energy you are likely to use every week for the next twelve months.
We do this by analysing:
- your historical energy usage for the last twelve months
- your school calendar to identify when the school buildings are in use
- the local weather conditions to determine when you are likely to use your heating
Using this data we can calculate a realistic estimate of your weekly consumption for the next twelve months, and then apply your percentage reduction.
Our estimates of your usage includes some adjustments to compensate for the COVID-19 lockdown when some schools may have been closed.
Your detailed progress report provides you more information on the weekly and monthly targets.