Is this the future for water? ESBI advises European Commission

The irish government was represented by the ESBI Environmental Group (EG) at a recent meeting of the European Commission Committee on Climate Change Adaptation that looked at the growing need to protect and conserve watersources.

ESBI is contributing to national policies in a number of areas including: biodiversity, biomass, ocean energy, carbon management and wastewater treatment. Members of the EG sit on committees established by organisations including: the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government, the Environmental Protection Agency, IBEC and the Business in the Community organisation. Closer to home, the Environmental Group also presented on the Water conservation topic at a national meeting of Environmental Protection Agency staff in Tullamore. Summer low-flows in Irish rivers and streams are projected to fall by 40% by the year 2050 and specific measures are being prepared to combat deterioration in the environment and to safeguard water supplies.

"We have a number of external consultancy projects underway at the moment, not to mention our in-house sustainability programme which is being addressed by and coordinated with an Environmental Management System (EMS)," commented Tommy Bree, Senior Project Manager with EG.

"The EMS is the management tool that we use when dealing with environmental awareness, energy efficiency and waste and carbon footprint management within ESBI. We're providing this service across all ESB business units and of course to external clients." As part of an ongoing project, the ESBI Environmental Group has helped estimate the total ESB Carbon (CO2) Footprint. The topic of Greenhouse Gas emissions from power stations has been subject to considerable attention, so this project concentrated specifically on alternate ESB sources of CO2 production such as: the vehicle fleet, office electricity consumption and staff business travel. Project findings indicate that about half of ESB CO2 emissions are derived from fleet and staff business travel and about half from the heating and lighting of buildings. In 2006, more than 45,000 tonnes of CO2 were generated from ESB activities.

This project will facilitate ESB in achieving its ambitious Carbon Reduction targets.