Transcript

SCOTT STONHAM

We've all become very accustomed to just leaving stuff on. Many things don't have a huge consumption when they're doing nothing. Typical TV today will have, if you have a relatively large screen TV and you leave that on standby, it's going to be generating, it's going to be drawing about 0.7 watts just from doing nothing, which isn't a tremendous amount, but it is some.

A smart speaker, like the one I've got over there, will generate up to I think it's 3.8 watts doing nothing, just sitting there. Now, if you think about that's doing – it's doing at least 3.8 watts, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and I don't use it all that time. I only use it when I'm awake. It's a huge amount of wasted power for something that just sits there doing nothing.

There's so many things that we've got used to just leaving on because it's either convenient or we don't actually realise that it needs to be – it is actually on. Leaving our things plugged in, our power supplies, even though they're not doing anything, they do generate – they do consume energy. So, there's this idea that I've got to – you don't standby. Turn off. Let's try and make sure we turn things off as much as we can.

There's another really simple thing we can all do, and that's to turn things down. I'm looking now at my 4K screen in front of me. It shipped with a default brightness of 95%. I've turned it down to 55%. To me, it's no different. I can use it in exactly the same way even in bright sunlight like I have here right now. But that change between 95% and 55% is saving me 10 watts every single hour of use. So that kind of all adds up, and this is just me. If we multiply that across thousands or tens of thousands of people, those 10 watts suddenly become quite significant.

And I think the other thing is it's a really obvious – a really non-obvious, I think I should say, dark mode. I never really understood the impact of dark mode, but if you've got an OLED screen on your phone or you're on your laptop or on your screen in front of you, if you're – if one of those pixels is black, it's off, not consuming any power. So actually, you can – on my phone here, this is an OLED screen. If I use dark mode all the time, I can get almost 30% more battery life out of this, meaning I have to charge it much less than I used to. Again, just a small thing, but multiply that by tens or thousands, and we've got quite a cumulative effect.

There's always a question why – if 80% of our emissions are in the things that we buy and the things that we use, why do we need to worry so much about cutting down the energy that we use when using a laptop and switching things off? I think this is really a story about changing behaviour in a preventative way. Our use of our technology in our digital lives is only accelerating. We're finding more and more ways to use technology in ways we've never thought about before.

You see, as we go on, we create more and more things for convenience that are just creating layers and layers of laziness on top of things. Definitely moving in that direction with digital as well. As things become convenient, we've become kind of more lazy to understanding what's going on behind them. So, what I'm hoping we can do with all of this work we're talking about right now is, before we get too far down that road where that 20% is no longer 20, it's the 80 because we've solved the procurement side because we will get better at that. At some point, there'll be a tipping point where we're just using more and more and more and more and more, and that energy we're using becomes the biggest factor in that equation.

So, before we get there, I'm trying to say let's be more aware. Let's be more conscious of the things we're doing and start to build in that decision making and that awareness in everything we do. So, instead of just consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming, we start to slow things down because, as in that example about the turning the brightness down on the screen, I didn't need it at 95%, it works perfectly well at 55%. But if I hadn't done that, the rest of my life I'd be using screens at 95% instead of 55%. So, in terms of preventing things, that's where I think this conversation is starting, it's helping us prevent a runaway scenario in the future.