She’s sat there. She’d be blocking your view of the telly entirely if you hadn’t gone for that 60-inch widescreen. Despite all your best efforts in coaxing the elephant out of your living room, she’s actually getting bigger.
We’re not quitting the metaphor just yet. We’ve published the The Elephant in the Living Room, the successor to 2006 study Rise of the Machines – and on first glance, the reading ain’t too pretty.
Indeed, it suggests that the ‘elephant’ – our love of electrical appliances and gadgets, accompanied by inefficient behaviour in the home – could see the UK miss its carbon emission reduction targets for domestic appliance electricity of a 34 per cent reduction in domestic appliance electricity carbon emissions from 1990 levels by as much as seven million tonnes. Yikes.
In 2009 the average British household contained a staggering three-and-a-half times as many gadgets and appliances as it did in 1990, and three of the worst offenders are the large plasma TV; large fridge freezer with ice-maker; and tumble dryer.
The report also finds that despite householders’ best efforts to switch to energy-efficient products, we are actually consuming more energy than five years ago.
But, and this is a big but, it’s not all doom and gloom. The elephant may be casting a big shadow, but there has been good progress since 2006 in improving standards and legislation such as banning patio heaters and incandescent lightbulbs. And there’s a labelling-led fightback against making electricity-guzzling choices on the high street.
If every household in the UK replaced just their old fridge freezer, washing machine and dishwasher with the most efficient Energy Saving Trust Recommended models, they could collectively save £585M on their fuel bills, and cut two million tonnes of CO2 emissions – enough to fill Wembley Stadium 257 times!
Given the word limitations of the blog format, we’re very much just stroking the elephant’s skin here. If you want to find out more about the electrical beast and how to stop her weighing you down, download the report at our website. You can also see the Guardian’s take on our findings here.
But don’t think we’re signing off without pointing you in the right direction of some direct advice to get the elephant out of your living room. Our Home Improvements section should be a good place to start.
I read the report with interest and it’s great to see that it takes account of the likely “decarbonisation” of the grid which means the per kWh emissions from electricity are likely to be less in 2020 than they are currently. It is worrying that even with renewable energy taken into account, we are still likely to miss our targets.
Even if everyone did replace the items you suggest items with the most energy efficient versions, the savings would account for less than one third (2 million tonnes) of the amount required (likely to be 7 million tonnes) to meet our targets.
So the elephant in the room isn’t going anywhere just yet!
We either need to ramp up decarbonisation (which is happening here in Scotland) or we all need to advocate an “anti-consumerist” (i.e. buy less stuff!) message, which is tricky at a time when we need the economy to grow.
I also think we need to include at least some mention of embodied emissions as future global agreements are likely to include some accounting of these (to share the burden of production emissions between all the countries that benefit from the product – including the end-user). If we start to include these in the figures, then energy reduction in the home is going to be a smaller part of the overall puzzle.
While the broad thrust of this report is welcomed, there are a number of issues with how it has been developed. The report uses the ‘reference’ scenario from the Defra report on energy and products, which assumes no new policies are implemented. The report itself suggests that policy interventions and technological improvements can only go so far – is the implication of this and the use of the reference scenario that they can’t go much further?
The Defra report also included two other scenarios: the ‘policy’ scenario – which explored what would happen if a number of identified but yet to be implemented policies were put in place; and a ‘best available technology’ scenario – which assumes that best available technologies on the current and future market are bought and installed from now on.
Using these two scenarios and comparing figures with the projected electricity use in Table 2, you see a 30% reduction with the policy scenario compared to the reference, and nearly a 50% reduction when you use the best available technology scenario.
What is important, I think, is that both these other scenarios put the onus on policy makers and manufacturers to deliver substantial improvements. This contrast with the Report, which by using the reference scenario, suggests that it is pretty much all down to the choices of consumers. The points made about the choices people make should still apply but they should be making those choices on a different set of more efficient products driven by policy and regulation.
Finally, perhaps the real elephant in the room with regards to this report is the consumption driven economy/society that encourages (and needs) people to be continuously buying more and new products. Obviously this may be a bigger issues than could be covered in this report but should perhaps be acknowledged.
Thanks for your comment, and yes indeed there are two additional scenarios for where products could be heading in the future. The reason we focused on the reference scenario for this report was because we can have the most confidence that the policies and legislation included in the Reference scenario will be enacted and hence will make a full contribution to energy and emission reductions.
The reference line contains ‘all policies that have been agreed by July 2009’. The policy line is estimated as a projection of ‘what will happen if a defined set of additional product-specific and related cross-cutting polices are implemented’. The policies were not necessarily funded or agreed by the time the MTP’s scenarios were produced.
So, while we absolutely welcome and encourage the improvements that these new policies and measures may/will make to the future total energy consumption of products, they are by their very nature, more speculative than the forecasts in the reference line. The Best Available Technologies (BAT) scenario is what could be described as the nirvana line, where we have a hypothetical projection of what could happen if the best available technologies on the current and future market are bought and installed from now on – so a scenario that is to be seen as a theoretical ‘best case’ but unlikely to be realised, especially in this current economic climate when consumer spending is on the wane.
We hope the report encourages all parties along the product supply chain to continue with their efforts and technological breakthroughs, but hopefully have highlighted that everyone has a part to play in this journey to ensure we maximise our potential savings.