Is homeworking good for the planet?
The energy and environmental implications of home working
In April, with the COVID-19 pandemic requiring us all to self-isolate if we can, over half of the active UK workforce worked from home. There already was a trend towards homeworking in the UK, with a quarter of us already working at home at least for part of the time. However, the extraordinary times we are living through are giving us a taste of a full societal shift to working from home by default.
The Pilio team has always had a flexible working arrangement as we live in different cities and have collaborators based overseas.
For our team, we find there are definitely upsides:
- The flexible working hours make it easier to balance caring responsibilities, hobbies and getting things fixed! For me personally I enjoy being able to take Daisy for a walk, which is a welcome break from my computer and a chance to think about our projects and new ideas.
- We avoid losing many hours each week stuck in a traffic jam or packed on a crowded bus.
- We tend to be more efficient in getting work done as there are fewer interruptions at home.
And for Pilio there has been the upsides of reduced office rent, attracting a wider talent pool, creating a positive workforce morale, and increasing staff productivity and retention.
There are challenges with homeworking as collaborating solely through video conferences is not the same as hashing out a new idea around the table or going to someone’s desk to quickly short circuit an issue. I am sure I am not alone in having conference call fatigue at the moment in our new world of Zoom. Plus, some of us on the team are juggling homeschool teaching and work commitments. The boundaries between work and home life can become quite blurred without a routine and clear delineation in time and space.
Energy & environmental impacts of homeworking
Putting to one side the pros and cons of home working, COVID-19 is giving us all a taster of what a large shift to homeworking might look like for the planet’s and our health. This month we have been doing some thinking on what are the energy and environmental impacts of homeworking and could this model — at scale — be an important contributor to our net zero carbon target for 2050.
Currently a fifth UK greenhouse gas emissions are from road transport, of which a significant proportion are due to commuting for work. Plus the serious public health risk that air pollution from burning fossil fuels is causing 40,000 deaths a year (8.3% of all deaths) and costs £40 billion annually in the UK. Air pollution levels are exacerbated by the 29% increase in traffic congestion since 1990.
So could homeworking be a just transition to net zero that would reduce emissions and associated air pollution levels? To dig into this question we have to understand the changes in home energy use and indoor air pollution levels. For example, home electricity has been up 30% during the middle of the day during the COVID-19 lockdown, and house energy accounts for 27% of the UK’s carbon footprint.
Domestic indoor air pollution has received an increasing amount of interest— we recently completed a project for Oxford City Council looking at this and the measures to reduce this pollution risk.
The energy and emissions impacts of homeworking
Pilio’s CSO Russell Layberry quantified the following impacts of homeworking:
i) Reduction in wasted commuting energy — £1,752 per year commuting cost per employee — mainly spent on petrol and diesel.
ii) Reduction in cooling costs associated with offices — at £200 per employee per year cooling costs tend to outweigh heating costs in modern offices.
iii) Reduction on heating costs associated with offices — at £120 per employee per year.
iv) The increase in heating costs associated with heating the homeworkers’ home/office — somewhere between £0 and £700 per employee per year (£700 represents a doubling in average heating use).
The environmental benefits are overwhelmingly in favour of homeworking although this is not without a cost that is passed on to the homeworker. The relative inefficiency of heating millions of homes rather than a smaller number of offices is considerable. So, if homeworking is to be good for the planet, we must tackle the impact of energy inefficient housing and gas boilers.
The home heating cost is the greatest unknown
The increase in home heating costs from homeworking can be quite variable, depending on:
i) Whether the home would be heated in the absence of homeworking (i.e. small children at home) — if so, the excess heating costs are zero.
ii) Whether the whole house or a single room/office is heated — surveys tend to show the former, but homeworking was still relatively rare prior to the pandemic.
It has tended to be that homeworking is of greatest emissions benefit when:
* the commute is long
* the worker is driving a petrol/diesel car
* the home would be heated anyway
* it is summer.
Reducing homeworking energy, cost and emissions
As a homeworker, what can you do to decrease your energy consumption, and the associated costs and carbon emissions?
We recommend:
i) Heating a single dedicated room — this can also help with the psychological effects of homeworking as it better separates your workspace from the rest of your home.
ii) Using electrical heating — fan heaters and electrical oil filled radiators are far easier to heat small spaces than central heating systems.
iii) Using a time dependent electricity tariff (requires a smart meter) and pre-heating — electricity costs are of the order of 18p/kWh for a domestic consumer but this falls to around 5p/kWh in the mornings. A 2kW fan heater timed to pre-heat a room on a time variable tariff may cost 30p — far less than the gas cost of pre-heating the entire house.
iv) Using heat pumps — heat pumps (reversible air conditioners) are localised electricity heaters which reduce the cost of the electricity 5-fold. They are perfect for single room heating and cheap, at an installation cost of £1200 or so.
v) Purchasing renewable energy — moving onto a green energy tariff helps drive the market to a zero emissions energy supply. Plus, home generation by installing photovoltaic panels or solar thermal systems.
vi) And, of course, energy monitoring — track your electricity, gas and fuel use (see https://www.piliogroup.com/).
A few final thoughts on making homeworking good for the planet
We think homeworking is here to stay and if done right will benefit people, businesses and wider society both in the immediate COVID-19 crisis and the long-term climate emergency. For homeworking to be a successful model, people need to be supported by their employers to create a healthy productive homeworking environment. Homeworkers need the tools, advice and incentives to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.
There is much policy talk about retrofitting homes to be electric as part of the UK net zero path. Growth in homeworking could help make the business case to unlock investment into improving the UK housing stock. A further interesting angle for companies committed to net carbon zero is that homeworking is defined as a Scope 3 carbon impact. Therefore, companies can be encourage to count this as part of their footprint and incentivised to assist their staff to save energy and procure green energy (e.g. companies running green energy supplier discount promotions).
This is our initial thinking on the energy and environmental implications of homeworking. We will continue to explore this issue to create the tools and resources to support business and home energy saving.
Are you a homeworker?
Subscribe to Pilio home energy to help you track your energy use and identify savings (£12/year).
Are you a company?
Offer Pilio to your staff to help them with home energy saving. Talk to us if you are interested in how to approach calculating the scope 3 emissions from homeworking and staff commuting.
