Energy and carbon

Here at the University of Bradford, we recognise our local, national and international responsibility to support positive change to challenges of climate change and carbon reduction. Our gas and electricity usage on city campus equates to around 7600tCO2e around a third of our overall carbon emissions as a university. As a city centre campus, we operate a district heat network served by gas fired CHP engines and gas boilers to heat our buildings and provide hot water. We also generate around 50% of our electricity usage on site via these CHP engines.

A programme of decarbonisation workstreams have been devised to optimise the way our systems operate, reduce our baseload by replacement of infrastructure, increase our renewable generation and improve our building fabric to prevent excessive heat loss. We have already started on this journey with our successful Public Sector Decarbonisation Programme Phase 1 and Phase 3a funding bids for in 2021 and 2022 which completed the cladding of Richmond Building and improving the energy performance of Unique Fitness.

We have a number of low carbon technologies on campus including:

• Solar PV
• Solar Thermal
• Air source heat pumps

We use throughout the campus, super efficient LEDs combined with automatic sensor control to save energy. 

Approximately 33% of the university’s emissions are attributed to scope 1 and 2 emissions, direct emissions from gas and electricity usage within our building stock. The remainder makes up our scope 3 emissions, from water, waste, procurement, travel. 

We have made great strides in reducing our scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions over the last 10 years with projects that have improved building fabric (external cladding, re-roofing and insulation, window replacement), removing of building stock from our portfolio and managing our space utilisation more efficiently, expanding and upgrading controls through our Building Management System (BMS) and introduction of on-site generation (CHP and Solar PV).