How do you measure up?
The chances are, if your company doesn’t burn it’s own fuel, have a large fleet of company owned vehicles or generate emissions via industrial processing, then the bulk of it’s carbon emissions can be attributed to the electricity it consumes from the grid. For many organisations their office space will be the largest consumer of this power and therefore source of emissions.
Just a reminder for those of you who miss the link between electricity consumption and carbon emissions - around 50% of electricity in Australia is generated from coal powered power stations and coal is the worst fossil fuel in terms of emissions produced.
In Australia the average office consumers around 250 kWh of electricity per square meter (sqm) per year. If you work in an office that’s 1000sqm it will consume around 250,000 kWh per year — this equates to around 250 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Just to put that in context the average family car produces around 4 tonnes of emissions per year. If you decided to offset those emissions you’d need around 1200 mature trees.
If you scale those numbers up to an entire office building the figures become scary. Applying the same calculations to an office tower like Central Park in Perth — an impressive 66,000sqm — and you’ll see it’s pushing out over 16,000 tonnes of emissions per year!
Of course some newer buildings maybe be a little more frugal than this while many older buildings may be generating considerably higher emissions per square meter of floor space.
If you’re interested in seeing how your building rates it may be worth checking to see if it’s accredited under the NABERS rating system. This is a performance-based rating scheme for existing commercial buildings to see how they manage their environmental impact.
Tags: Australia, Electricity, Greenhouse Gas Abatement, Office
