It was one of the proudest moments yet for the 10:10 climate campaign to cut carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. Within days of coming to office, David Cameron committed the entire central government estate to a 10% reduction in emissions within a year.
As part of that pledge, Cameron said that all departments would be installing live energy meters, enabling staff and the public alike to easily track their progress.
Five months later, these meters are now in place (not bad going for a public-sector technology project) and the government's data website has started publishing a league table of the various departments' progress, allowing everyone to see which are doing best and worst in their quest to save energy. The league table draws on data from GovSpark, a website that aggregates the various departmental energy feeds and ranks them according to the month-to-month increase or decrease.
There were bound to be teething problems however, and for now the website doesn't give meaningful data at the beginning of a month – ie right now. The problem appears to be the fact that the system doesn't yet adjust for the ratio of weekdays to weekend days at the beginning of a month. Because the weekend fell at the start of this month, as I write this every department appears to have made major savings, which isn't likely to be true. I'll check back in next week when the numbers should have settled to see how the various departments are doing.
Interestingly, the brain behind GovSpark was 16-year-old Isabell Long, who attended a Rewired State 'hackday', at which web developers were encouraged to come up with interesting online projects based on government data. Off the back of that success, Rewired State has now joined up with 10:10 and the Guardian to put on a special carbon and energy hackday weekend at the end of October.
