Is being green a turn-off?

Teleworkers who neglect to switch off their kit may not be the eco-vandals some would have us believe.

Every night, I switch off the IT in my study. It’s a triumph for government doctrine, certainly; but is it a triumph for the environment? Teleworkers, among others, need to know.

Well: from 1970 to 2001, in absolute terms, the use of electricity at home grew by 49 percent. Mains-based equipment and especially IT hardware explain much of the extra juice that householders now rely on.

What about emissions of CO2? House of Lords research suggests that, in 2002, “lights and appliances”, plus cookers, accounted for 28 percent of the annual 147.6 megatonnes of CO2 (MtC) linked to houses in the UK. No wonder Gordon Brown’s Budget included a drive to persuade consumer electronics retailers to inveigle shoppers into buying low-energy-consumption gadgets.

Extraordinarily, Britain’s newly-formed Institution of Engineering and Technology does not publish statistics for the CO2 associated with home IT. Still, figures for 1995/6 published by one of the IET’s forebears, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, are revealing. Central heating accounts for nearly 20 percent of home-related CO2 emissions; hot water and lighting, a little more than 10 percent each. Fridges aside, no single type of white goods accounts for more than 10 percent of home-related CO2. Nor do cookers, or CRT TVs.

A decade on from the IEE stats, I’d guess that the IT hardware in UK homes now accounts for 15 percent of home emissions. So if everyone baled right out of all home IT from now on, perhaps 15 percent would be sliced off the 28 percent of emissions that are associated with home equipment – in other words, about four percent of home-related emissions.

Maybe after decades of government campaigns, half of UK households will eventually turn off their IT for half the time it’s on now. Then the carbon savings would equate to one percent of home-related emissions, or 0.27 percent of emissions across all UK homes, workplaces and transport.

Moral? Improvements in the energy efficiency of IT products in the home make an easy and rapid, if modest, difference to CO2; but behavioural change won’t make such a difference any time soon.

Anyway, the CO2 emissions for which the home office is held guilty are made at power stations, not in the home. There is no carbon “footprint” around IT in the home. Rather, it is the carbon intensity of power stations that links residential IT to quite large emissions of CO2.If you want to be a non-polluter, change your kit or, better still, the nation’s primary energy supply – but not your habits with delivered energy in the home. Meanwhile, resist the government’s attempts to guilt-trip electricity users.