2023-10-18 08:22:07
Paris (AFP) – If everyone teleworks at the same time in a company, allowing the premises to be closed for at least two days, energy savings (heating, lighting, air conditioning, transport) can reach 25% to 35%, depending on a study carried out at the request of the government.
“The trades have to lend themselves to it, that’s the limit, but when we manage to completely shut down the site, we achieve substantial energy savings,” underlines Christophe Rodriguez, deputy director of the French Institute for the Energy Performance of Buildings (IFPEB), which supervised a full-scale experiment, the first of its kind in France.
Empirically, he emphasizes, one would tend to think that teleworking saves energy for the company but generates major excess consumption at home, but this is not the case.
“This is the basic received idea,” underlines Mr. Rodriguez to AFP.
“The study reveals two things,” he said. “First, teleworking must be synchronized, and what works well is to close for everyone on Friday, so the building shuts down three days in a row. Second lesson, the rebound effect in housing is on average quite weak, of the order of only 8%.
Around a hundred administration agents on ten sites, in Paris, La Défense, Orléans, Angers and Valbonne, took part in the game and agreed to monitor their consumption at the office, at home (gas and electricity) and their transport for five months last winter.
A small sample but whose participants agreed to answer in-depth questionnaires: “When they were at the office, we tried to understand who was at home, a spouse, an animal, if they had reduced the heating or if they did not had not done so, why, and we had a warrant to recover their consumption data,” continues Mr. Rodriguez.
The results were then correlated with the observations of ten large private companies, Allianz, La Poste Immobilier, Natixis, BPCE, SNCF or Crédit Agricole Immobilier which carried out organizational tests, with the result of a report to be published by the beginning November, bringing together all the tips and tricks for combining teleworking and energy savings.
“A challenge”
The conclusion of the study is that the energy savings per teleworker and per day during a one-day site closure reach “25% or even 35% with an inefficient site whose occupants take the car to travel home -work”, in other words if offices are an energy sieve and if employees do not have daily public transport.
The carbon savings are even greater, between 30% and 45%, according to the study.
Leaving the premises open but only heating one floor of the company would be an option on paper but it is “complicated to implement”, according to Mr. Rodriguez, and might not be measured.
Still, establishing identical teleworking days for all employees is a challenge.
This is the case, for example, at the street furniture manufacturer JCDecaux. With a view to reducing the energy consumption of its buildings, the company closed its sites in France last year between Christmas and New Year’s Day, except for the preparation of posters or assembly.
The operation will be reissued this year. But synchronizing teleworking “is not envisaged given the nature of our activities which requires business continuity”, indicates the company.
In France, around 27% of employees were teleworking in January 2021 (the latest figures available, Editor’s note), the most diligent being executives of large private companies, according to the statistical department of the Ministry of Labor (Dares).
Constantly increasing since 2000, teleworking was a minority before Covid and concerned around 4% of workers in 2019, mainly executives, before its forced massive experimentation during the health crisis which established it in the landscape, for the benefit of certain employees .
In OECD countries, teleworking is more widespread among employees with a high level of education, a high salary, living in a large city and employees of a large company.
© AFP
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