Helping the police with their enquiries

Was someone nicking electricity from Keynsham police station?

When the B&NES district of Avon and Somerset Constabulary took a look at their utility bills, they noticed something odd. The station at Keynsham was using much more electricity than expected – more even than Bath police station, which employs three times as many people.

Was electricity being stolen? The answer, disappointingly for the headline writers, was no. A data-logger showed that Keynsham was indeed using all this electricity and that its use dropped little at night or at weekends. Clearly there is work to do as regards how equipment is used.

Subsequent audits by Our Big Energy Challenge have shown that lights are frequently left on in unoccupied rooms and that almost all of the station’s 43 computers are left on day and night with none of the power-saving features – like standby and sleep mode – being used.

The station’s IT department is now investigating whether its computers can be shut down at night, or need to be left on to allow security updates and data archiving procedures to take place – particularly important for a service like the police. Opinion remains divided.