The judges at the RAC Cooling Industry Awards also named client, BAE Systems, a winner in the ‘End User (Non-supermarket) of the Year’ category. Together with energy consultants, Joule Consultants, Airedale helped BAE Systems Warton achieve annual savings of 70-80% on its computer room air conditioning energy costs, equivalent to ?350,000 per annum, through a year-long programme of component upgrades, controls integration and system refinements. It has also enabled BAE Systems to maximise resilience of its installation where critical testing and production of combat and training aircraft is carried out.
Commenting on the increased demand in retrofit work being undertaken by Airedale, UK aftersales manager Adrian Trevelyan, said: “The efficiency savings resulting from a retrofit programme can be substantial, with surprisingly rapid returns on investment. Normally you would expect a payback of 24-30 months on a project of this type but with BAE Systems we achieved this within just 15 months.”
The RAC judges said: “BAE Systems has shown that becoming an intrinsic part of the design process and showing leadership by ensuring that suppliers understand their aims to reduce their carbon footprint and energy use has enabled two significant projects to come to fruition on time and on budget and deliver the projected savings.”
The large-scale retrofit project is also shortlisted in the ‘Technology’ category in the 2015 Energy Institute awards (https://www.energyinst.org/events/ei-awards/shortlisted-projects-for-2015 ) in addition to ‘Sustainable Project of the Year 2015’ in the HVR Awards (http://www.hvrawards.com/shortlist/).
Airedale Managing Director, Clive Parkman said: “We’ve achieved tremendous success in the last two awards seasons, testimony to our commitment to developing technologies and solutions that set the benchmark in terms of efficiency and resilience and which provide best value for data centre owners and operators.”