We all need to save energy: for our wallets, for Ukraine and for our future. In desperate efforts to bring energy bills down to affordable levels, people try perilous things like flower pot heaters and lighting the indoors barbecue. Good government communication about safe energy savings is therefore potentially life-saving.
The government campaign focuses mainly on shorter showers: 2.5 minutes shorter showers save about 16 cents. Every little bit helps, of course, but this is just a tiny bit. It varies quite a bit per household, but about three quarters of household gas consumption is due to heating. More than half of the population has the heating on 20 degrees or higher: putting one degree lower saves about 170 euros a year.
But it is difficult to say exactly how much a particular measure will save. On the one hand because some houses are more or less insulated than others, but also because measures have spin-off effects. Thus it is calculated that the not using the oven saves 32 cents each time. Of course, it only does that if the alternative is a cold meal. If you cook on a (gas) stove, you also lose a few dimes. And the heat that comes from the oven also ensures that the heating can be temporarily lowered.
Paradoxically, the best saving tip is to spend money. Have walls insulated or take solar panels or a hybrid heat pump: you have lost thousands of euros, but you will earn it back in five to ten years. The problem with this is, of course, that people who can no longer pay their energy bills cannot invest ten thousand euros at all, while columnists with a professor’s salary can, for example. These savings subsidies are therefore not suitable for energy poverty, but they are intended to further increase inequality.
Another point that is not reflected in government communication is energy consumption by non-households. A five-minute shower while we want to make sure that we can eat Dutch strawberries in energy-guzzling greenhouses, even in the middle of winter, feels like sticking a draft strip against the window while you leave the back door open.
If businesses and industry also reduce their energy consumption, this can also lead to lower energy bills for households: after all, the law of supply and demand states that the price falls when demand falls. It does not matter whether the demand falls because we shower en masse less or because we no longer buy bunches of flowers.
It would be good if the government would communicate better what consumers can do to make companies use less energy, because often little is known about this. Last year there was a lot of fuss about the possible arrival of a data center from Facebook to Zeewolde. It would consume as much power as half a million households – all needed so we can stream movies and do things in the cloud. Despite the massive outcry about such an energy guzzler, we have all continued to stream and use cloud services equally, because it is not visible enough what their energy impact is. And as long as one does not know what something ‘costs’, there is no tendency to use it economically. An information campaign that goes beyond taking shorter showers can help us take a step out of this crisis.
Casper Albers is professor of statistics at the University of Groningen.