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Canary Wharf 'biggest power waster'
Mark Prigg, Science Correspondent10.10.07
Canary Wharf was today named as one of the biggest power wasters in the capital.
A BBC investigation of City buildings showed that companies in the tower are wasting £17m a year by leaving their lights switched on.
And other companies are also guilty of wasting power included US investment bank 25 Bank Street and HSBC's head office.
The study of the City skyline at midnight on a Sunday night was carried out on behalf of the BBC's Inside Out programme and found a quarter of all lights in the area were left on between 9pm and midnight on that Sunday night.
The worst offender was Canary Wharf Tower where the majority of the 30 companies left their lights on their lights on, wasting the equivalent 4.7 million kilowatt hours each year.
That is enough to power more than 1,000 households for 12 months and means the tower is emitting the same amount of Co2 as 4,094 transatlantic flights.
In second place came 25 Bank Street, home to a major US investment bank and two other large companies. The lights on there are wasting 3.3 million kilowatt hours which is enough to power 700 homes for a year.
And in third position was the HSBC headquarters, a company that is proud of its green credentials. But the survey showed the building is wasting 2.8 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
Experts today estimated the total cost of the wasted electricity bill over the buildings surveyed was £17m, and accused the major banks at faulty of hypocrisy.
Trewin Restorick of Global Action Plan, which carried out the study for the BBC, said: "We were extremely dissapointed by these results.
"A lot of these banks, such as HSBC, make a real point in their advertising of being green. Yet they cannot even turn off their own office lights at the weekend.
"If there's no one in the offices, it's a huge problem, because all these lights need energy to power them, the energy comes from gas power stations and coal. Creating the energy puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that's causing global warming. We worked out in the square mile that they were wasting £17 million a year on their energy, that's 200,000 tonnes of c02."
The study used binoculars to manually cound the number of lights on around Canary Wharf, and 28,000 windows were counted. The worst offender was the Canary Wharf Tower, which houses over 30 companies.
However, the Canary Wharf Group, who manage the building, said it simply rented out the premises.
"Like any other landlord Canary Wharf Group cannot dictate its tenants' electricity usage," the company said.
"At Canary Wharf, where 100 per cent of the energy comes from renewable resources, some tenants have staff working round the clock, seven days a week which requires higher than usual energy consumption".
However, campaigners hit back, claiming that as part of the study they looked for workers in the buildings with lights left on and found very few people in the office.
Inside Out London will be shown tonight on BBC 1 at 7.30pm.
Reader views (3)
Canary Wharf at night is a glorious sight. How typical of the Green Meanies to want to impose their miserable gloominess on everyone else.
- John Rimmer, London
What about global warming doesn't anyone care? That is pathetic.
- Jand, USA
Having just finished a cleaning job at a university I was so amazed at the power wastage, staff would go home at night leaving their air conditioning units on in the office. When I came in to clean at 6am I would have to switch it off as it was like a furnace, the temperature would be set at 28 degrees and I felt ill trying to work. I was told off by one nurse in particular, (who reported me to my boss), who said it was too inconvenient to press a simple switch when turning off her light and I should not touch it. I offered to switch it back on when I had finished cleaning and she said I was to leave it alone as it would take too long to get back up to temperature,(these units react immediately so she was lying to me. This was unbelievable especially as we were in the middle of a heat wave, also the rest of the university had the radiators full on and apparently the heating never got switched off, no matter what time of year. All the explanation I was given was we don't pay for it the government does! It's a waste of money, resources, and very damaging to the environment but who do you tell and who is really interested?
- Tracey, Derby
