Launched by Forum for the Future in 2009, the West of England Carbon Challenge (WECC) today supports more than 100 businesses, public and third sector organisations in Bristol and Bath on their path to reduce carbon emissions. It challenges participants to commit to making an annual cut in emissions for four years to reach a cumulative total of at least 10% by 2012/13. Members receive advice, tools and practical support to measure, manage and reduce their CO2 emissions.

WECC participants now get free access to a Community version of EnergyDeck. It allows members to track up to 5 "meters" (i.e., data input sources) and access selected advanced features. Further, by signing up to the WECC group on EnergyDeck, participants can compare themselves against aggregate peer benchmarks and view savings measures (fully anonymised) implemented by others in the group. Forum for the Future - as the WECC group administrator - can easily view, analyse and aggregate the consumption data submitted by members in a single account.

The collaboration will be announced on July 2nd at the 2012 WECC Carbon Champion Awards event in Bristol with Jonathon Porritt.

Says James Taplin, Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future:

“One of the greatest challenges that we face in transitioning to a sustainable future is how to take groundbreaking ideas and initiatives to such a scale that they become the new normal. If we are going to cut our carbon and shift to more sustainable patterns of energy consumption then it is important that we work together to do so. This is the ethos that lies behind the WECC – collective responsibility and action across an entire region – but what we have also found through the frequent events that WECC runs to help the businesses is that positive change happens fastest when peers can interact and learn from each other.

A large part of our decision to use EnergyDeck now is because of this. Not only is it simple to use for participants and for ourselves – providing all of the data that we need in a standardised and comparable format – but it also helps build the WECC community and allows businesses to learn from one another. The ability for businesses to benchmark themselves against organisations around the world is great for helping them understand the average, or best practice. But it is even more powerful for them to see what their immediate peers are doing, understand what is instantly practical and possible, and then be able to share their experiences with one another through WECC to avoid pitfalls and build on the successes in the group.

We also want WECC to grow – join-ups to the group are accelerating as the benefits of working together are seen, as organisations ask their supply-chain partners to participate, and as being part of the group becomes the usual, rather than unusual way of working on energy & carbon savings. As it grows, however, it provides us with a challenge of managing the data, and accelerating the learning between all of the participants. We think that EnergyDeck solves that challenge – it puts WECC on a firm future trajectory that, crucially, helps it to scale further and become the new norm. We are also excited by the possibilities of using EnergyDeck to compare our community of businesses with other communities, and so learn more about what is possible at aggregated scales.”