By Onche Ogbole
At eHealth Africa, we attribute our successes in the interventions and programs we implement to the virtuous cycle that uses data to drive decision-making and execution. As an organization, we also employ the same virtuous cycle in our operations to become more efficient and sustainable. As we work to strengthen health systems and improve the lives of people in the communities we work in, we also have to look at how we operate to ensure that our operations do not burden or negatively impact the communities we live and work in. As we reviewed how we work, we asked ourselves about our consumption of energy and had to challenge ourselves to become more energy efficient to reduce our carbon footprint while reducing our costs. When we started the journey towards energy efficiency, we knew that we had to do a better job with energy waste as it accounted for approximately 20% of our energy consumption. We knew that our approach had to be multi-pronged to get the results that we wanted for ourselves and needed to reduce our negative impact on the environment. Our approach included implementing policies, educating our people, and using technology and data to improve our systems.
What We Did and How It’s Working
In 2019, we started implementing our plan to be more energy-efficient and ensured that data was the bedrock of our decision-making and optimization. Our plan included:
Installing an energy management system (EMS). This smart system has automated the most common way we use energy, switching lights on and off. Now we no longer had to hope that the last person to leave the office remembered to switch off the lights, it now happens according to a schedule.
Installing a renewable energy system. Currently, we have installed a 180kw inverter systems at our Kano campus to provide backup to the existing diesel generator, and grid. These energy sources run on a schedule using a cloud-based monitoring, and scheduling system. eHA has generated 127,236.41kWh between January 2019 and March 2020 across most of our locations in Nigeria.
Installing an Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) in the Power house. This allows us to automatically select the appropriate available energy sources based on our load demand.
Using energy-saving appliances looking for the most eco-friendly options
Conducted energy audits at our locations across Nigeria to determine load usage and design systems that best matched the usage at each location
Facilitated environment and energy management training to our colleagues: We educated them about our environmental impact and energy management. This gave a clear perspective on how we can individually continue to reduce our electricity usage. This was complemented by introducing policies that supported better energy consumption. We have since observed an increase in employee awareness and a positive change in employee behavior. By December 2019, we observed a 30% decrease in our energy bills.
Monitoring, tracking, and measuring daily energy usage. Currently, the engineering team keeps track of the daily energy consumption of all units at the Kano campus. This helps us know which block is consuming more energy and to see how we can immediately address the inefficiencies.
These energy efficiency measures put into place help us to ensure environmental sustainability at eHA. Last year, these measures contributed to the reduction of CO2 emission by 129 tons at the eHA Kano campus and 201.4 tons across all other locations. We will continue to do our part to reduce our carbon footprint and look for innovative and proven solutions to reduce our energy waste.