How your quiet night at home is destroying the planet
By Ben Russell21 August 2002
It is evening. The curtains are drawn, the halogen lights have been turned down low. A compact disc is playing on the stereo. Later, there's the prospect of watching that new Tom Cruise movie on the DVD player. The microwave has just pinged to announce that the chicken tikka is ready to serve. Maybe there'll be time to sneak in a few rounds of Premiership Manager on the PlayStation before bed.
While this is the sort of evening many Britons may look forward to as they struggle through their working day, such domestic indulgence comes at an increasingly heavy cost for the environment.
A new report from the Government reveals how the increasingly luxurious lifestyles enjoyed by many Britons, and their reliance on ever-greater numbers of electrical appliances, have led to a spiralling rise in household energy consumption since 1970. Indeed, as we confront the reality of global warming at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg next week, we need look no further than our own living rooms for the cause.
Advances in insulation and the development of low-energy lightbulbs, whilst positive developments, have not prevented the boom in consumer goods, many of which consume power even when not in use. The tendency to leave televisions and other electrical items on standby is a significant contributory factor.
Overall electricity use soared by almost 50 per cent between 1970 and 2000. There has been an 18 per cent rise in electricity consumption per person since 1970. The popularity of interior design demanding soft, low light from table lamps, spotlights and wall fittings rather than single bulbs dangling from ceilings has led to an 11 per cent rise in the power used for lighting Britain's homes. A plethora of new electronic goods, from DVD players to PC and games consoles have helped contribute to a nine per cent rise in home power use.
The trends are revealed in a major study of domestic, industrial, commercial and transport power usage carried out by the Department for Trade and Industry and the Office of National Statistics. Demand for power for heating, which made up nearly 60 per cent of all energy used in the home in 2000, has also increased, growing by a quarter between 1970 and 2000. Energy used for water heating has also risen by 15 per cent, as people became used to ever warmer, centrally heated homes. Homes were heated to an average 18C in 2000, five degrees warmer than the average 30 years ago.
But despite the inexorable rise in demand for power, consumption for cooking fell, because of the growing popularity of takeaways and eating out.
The stark statistics, which come on the eve of the Johannesburg environmental summit, led to immediate calls for new regulations to force manufacturers to end the production of appliances which use power on standby, estimated to account for 1 per cent of the United Kingdom's total domestic energy consumption.
Environmental and energy campaigners also called for new laws to ensure that all electrical products are rated for energy efficiency to alert consumers to power-guzzling goods.
The DTI report concluded: "The amount of energy used by appliances has increased by 9 per cent since 1990, which has been the result of increases in the total number of appliances bought and used by households as well as the increase in the number of households."
It added that energy consumption for lighting had increased by 63 per cent since 1970 and 11 per cent since 1990. "the increase has been mainly due to the shift away from rooms lit by a single ceiling bulb towards multi-source lighting from wall and table lamps as well as multi ceiling lights."
Estimates produced by the Energy Saving Trust, a Government-backed organisation set up in 1992 after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to cut power use and greenhouse gas emissions, show that domestic electrical goods sitting on standby cost more than £400m a year. The trust, which received £25m from the Government last year, estimates that each year videos use electricity worth £113m, and television sets use power worth £50m a year just waiting to be switched on; 85 per cent of the electricity used by your VCR is consumed while it is not actually on. Set-top boxes for digital television could be costing UK households £357m every year in electricity by 2010, the trust said.
The Electricity Association, which represents Britain's electricity providers, insisted its members were working to encourage energy efficiency and were funding campaigns to raise public awareness of the issue. A spokeswoman said: "Consumption has gone up over the last few years, due to such things as home computers, more appliances in households, as well as the fact that there are simply more households and the housing stock is getting older, and therefore less efficient."
Margot Marshall, a spokeswoman for the Energy Saving Trust, said many consumers would be shocked to see how much power was used by everyday appliances.
She called for an extension of energy labelling, used to rate domestic appliances such as dishwashers, washing machines and fridges since 1994, which has been credited with producing a radical improvement in efficiency. And she called on manufacturers to improve the efficiency of new electronic goods to ensure that they can be turned off.
Earlier this year, the Downing Street Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair's personal think-tank, called for a 20 per cent improvement in household energy efficiency by 2010, with another 20 per cent improvement by 2020.
Campaigners are anxious that the issue of rising power consumption is addressed in the Government's forthcoming energy White Paper. But many fear that the document will focus on electricity supply and nuclear power.
Friends of the Earth criticised the Government for failing to tax power usage. A spokesman said: "Energy efficiency is a Cinderella issue."
But a spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said ministers would launch a domestic energy-saving strategy, reviving the "Save It" message of the 1970s, to help meet a commitment to cut carbon emissions from electricity and gas power by 400,000 tons by 2005. He said: "We are committed to the introduction of energy efficiency and we will be working towards our climate change goals."
Ms Marshall said: "It's very easy for us to save a lot of power, even just by turning off lights and stopping draughts. Other things require a bit of expenditure but you can cover the cost in one to three years. But to break through and get consumers really thinking about this issue we need the Government's backing. We need real interest. People need to be aware that very time they flick a switch they are using energy and power stations are pumping carbon into the atmosphere."
