Green Gown Awards 2011 - Sustainable Construction & Refurbishment - Edge Hill University

The Durning Centre - Highly Commended

Completed in July 2010, the £4.2m Durning Centre at Edge Hill University is a building that incorporates unique sustainability innovations. For example, an array of photovoltaic cells serves this building, which is entirely heated by the recovered waste heat from the university’s IT servers and the Data Centre. If not reused, such waste heat energy from IT equipment would be exhausted to the atmosphere.

The building has delivered significant results. Thanks to photovoltaic cells, it generates 25.2MW of electricity annually while avoiding 14.8t of CO₂. Annually, it recovers an equivalent amount of 30.6MW of waste heat from the university mainframe computer, avoiding a further 17.3t of CO₂. The CO₂ it avoids is equivalent to planting nearly 50,000 urban trees over its service life. It also avoids the carbon equivalent of planting 823 trees per year.