Outside broadcasting company Cloudbass has installed a new smart meter at its HQ in Ripley, Derbyshire to help staff become more aware of its carbon footprint.
The aim of the meter is to embed sustainability into the culture of the company. It is situated in a prominent position in Cloudbass’ building, next to the company’s booking system, managing director Steve Knee tells TVBEurope. “It gets everyone used to seeing the amount of energy we are using and therefore considering the difference they can make, [such as] turning a truck off that doesn’t need to be on.”
Knee adds that Cloudbass wants to “focus the minds” of its employees on the use of energy and embed it into the culture of the company.
“As a company, we seek to tie environmental and commercial sustainability together, so the two go hand in hand, as we strongly believe that doing the right thing for environmental reasons can be good for business, hence the inclusion of the cost of electricity on the meter.”
The monitoring is done by a device called a Shelly Pro 3EM (Three Phase CT clamp energy monitor), which tracks each of the 4x outgoing circuits from the main intake Distribution Board.
Each of the circuits can communicate with its own cloud service; but Cloudbass uses a local Wi-Fi connection to view and log the data on a central raspberry pi running Home Assistant. “This is what hosts the back end of the display in the garage,” explains Knee.
“This system also monitors the Tesla Power walls on GT3 (when in range of the local Wi-Fi network) as well as the Power Wall and UPS in the server room.”
Cloudbass already uses off-grid green power solutions for its on-site productions and is seeking to transition larger productions to this through a combination of grid power at the venues as well as off-grid battery solutions. “As we have always provided our own power solutions, we are uniquely placed as a supplier to drive down the energy requirement of the technical resources as well as providing reliable green off-grid solutions,” states Knee.
The company is also building relationships with the likes of Tesla as it looks to transition to electric tractor units (the ‘Semi’) as soon as possible. “We would also like to help drive the industry to EV travel as we have lots of experience of getting crews to site in a sustainable way, which is entirely possible even given the long distances and tight timescales that we are used to in our industry.”
Knee says that the team at Cloudbass is fully on board the company’s sustainability efforts, including a salary sacrifice electric vehicle scheme which the company launched three years ago. “With over 30 per cent of our staff transitioning to EVs through the scheme, they are already well versed in the transition to sustainable power.
“Our clients originally drove the need for more action on sustainability so we took the decision to be an industry leader in this area which they have really appreciated, as we can now help them to transition their production through our expertise.”
