Multi-million-pound grants have been made available to HM Naval Base Portsmouth to continue to drive down energy use and reduce the base’s impact on the environment.
It means that up to £3.5m is available for a mixture of new building projects and upgrades to the existing estate.
All seven grants have been provided by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and work has already commenced on delivering these projects, including the new Queen Elizabeth Class Forward Logistics Centre (QLC).
Naval Base Commander Commodore JJ Bailey ADC said: “We are grateful for the investments from wider Government as we all work together to meet the Government’s carbon reduction goals and our base’s ambition of being carbon-neutral by 2040.
“The Forward Logistics Centre will be the first carbon-neutral building on the base, an exciting development in our carbon reduction strategy, but we recognise that we will not stop here and that there is more work to do in improving the energy efficiency of the legacy estate – some of it built before the Industrial Revolution but still part of the equation in reducing how we remove carbon emissions from our operational outputs.”
Two grants are providing up to £625,000 for the solar panels and LED lighting at the QLC; the solar energy will recharge electric forklift trucks used to move pallets for the QEC class carriers enabling the operations in this 21st century logistics centre to be carbon-free.
Further funding will enable solar panel canopies over existing car park spaces, improvements in the management and monitoring of HMS Nelson’s energy supply saving about 600 tonnes of CO2 per year, and additional funding to replace single glazed windows with triple in Victory Building, further installation of LED in place of mechanical ballast lighting in three buildings, and improvements to heating system in another.
Most recent available figures show that base power consumption has been reduced by more than 50% since 2003, from 275,000MWHrs to 134,000 in 2018/19, and in doing so carbon emissions have been reduced by nearly two-thirds to 31,300 tonnes.
Various efficiency measures have been introduced over that time to accelerate the reduction in carbon emissions, including other solar panel installations, electric vehicles to replace diesel, and use of combined heat and power plants.
The base has also just installed three small wind turbines to power offices at D Lock, and the data from here will determine whether more buildings are fitted with similar turbines.
