OCL LED Lighting Switch Over Project In Partnership with eEnergy

Over the 23/24 academic year, the buildings amongst our estate at Oasis Community Learning embarked on a huge project to change over all our lighting to LED sustainable lighting. OCL partnered with eEnergy to undertake this monumental project. It has been great partnering with eEnergy over the last year and half, especially Frankie Hutton who has operationally ran the project with us. Working mostly overnight to minimise the disruption to our academy staff and students, engineers and installers switched over 27,150 lights to new, energy-efficient LED lighting.

In most schools, lighting is the largest consumer of electricity, however our LED switch over will reduce our electricity consumption by a huge 15%. For some of the project early switchovers, we are already seeing the noticeable differences in energy consumption and the savings that come with this. 

We asked Jessica Marshall, our National Environmental & Sustainability Lead what the project means for the trust, “Switching all of our lights to LEDs is one of the key first steps to becoming net zero carbon as a trust, by reducing the energy we consume and being more efficient it helps us in one of our core sustainability commitments; being climate considerate too. In the 23-24 academic year we reduced our electricity consumption by 10.5% from the previous year*, although we can’t separate out lighting from other power use, we know that switching to LEDs will have had a significant positive contribution to this.”

*excluding our PFI academies which weren't part of the LED project.

Frankie Hutton, Field Services Director at eEnergy added “This has been a fantastic project to work on. The eEnergy team and I are delighted to have had the opportunity to work with such a high profile education client as Oasis Community Learning. We’re thrilled to be able to make such a tangible difference, delivering significant energy cost and carbon savings for the Trust as well as creating a lighter, brighter learning environment for pupils and teachers.

"As a result of this project, OCL will reduce their annual carbon emissions by 438 tonnes, that’s the equivalent of planting 20,117 trees! It’s been a huge team effort, with close collaboration between the eEnergy and OCL teams with lots of late nights and weekends to deliver this game-changing project and help OCL with this significant step on their Net Zero journey!” 

A huge thank you to all of the Property & Estates Directorate, the National Finance Team and Environmental & Sustainability Lead who have all been instrumental in delivering this large and complex project for the Trust.