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National's energy savings can finance a play every year
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent27.07.09
The National Theatre is saving enough energy to pay for a production every year after a bold environmental drive.
It has met its target of cutting energy consumption by 20 per cent since 2006 and set itself a 25 per cent figure to hit by December.
The savings have translated into an annual financial dividend of £100,000 - which is equivalent to a new show in the Cottesloe, the smallest of the National's three stages. The success has prompted the theatre to consider a bigger long-term plan. Architecture company Haworth Tompkins has delivered a masterplan which includes environmental measures worth £10million that it says will transform the theatre over the next two to three decades.
They include the National using excess heat on site to generate hot water in a system known as combined heat and power, or CHP. The system would cost £1million but would pay for itself within four years. The savings so far have been made thanks to technology such as movement detectors to trigger lighting in the lavatories, so it switches off when no one is there, and a new extractor fan in the car park. The National also stopped a tradition of switching on certain stage lights three hours before curtain-up because they would not work without time to warm up. It found that modern ones were far more reliable.
Partly thanks to a £500,000 deal with Philips, the theatre has also replaced halogen and tungsten lights with LEDs, which are expensive but last a long time and use relatively little power.
The National last month won a silver medal from Mayor Boris Johnson at the Green500 awards.
Reader views (1)
Combined heat and power should be mandatory in every large enough building, be it a factory, office block or a block of flats. It's crazy that power stations waste around 40% of their fuel as heat up a chimney, while people elsewhere are burning fuel in boilers to keep warm. CHP is simply putting a small power station in a building that needs heating, so that the "waste" heat isn't wasted at all!
- Nigel, London
