3 tips for calculating WFH emissions for 2020

Jan 1

published 9.15.21

In early 2020, the majority of corporate employees shifted their work environments to work from home. A year and a half into the pandemic, many companies are considering a return to normal or testing fully remote or hybrid work environments. Companies would expect to see a decrease in emissions due to a reduction of business flights and commute. However, there were areas that actually saw an increase, specifically home working. During COVID almost everyone worked from home and moving forward many companies plan to keep a flexible work environment. For this reason it is crucial for ALL companies to measure work from home (teleworking) emissions moving forward.

The fundamental step towards a net-zero future starts with a greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) inventory.

Any company that wants to identify the impact of emissions sources should know their carbon footprint. That includes direct and indirect operations globally in order to implement impactful climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. GHG inventories account for company emissions annually allowing to track and monitor the carbon footprint associated with business operations, including 100% of Scope 1 direct and Scope 2 indirect emissions sources. Scope 3 emissions represent all upstream and downstream activities beyond the company’s direct control, but are associated with its operations and services.

The qb. approach to accounting Scope 3 Homeworking emissions

Scope 3 reporting depends on the company’s access to data collection and validation with multiple stakeholders. This is a challenging and relevant process as it is estimated that scope 3 emissions are nearly 5.5 times larger than scope 1 and 2. In the past, most companies have not disclosed homeworking emissions due to a lack of a clear methodology. They have been considered not material along with other emission sources for Scope 3 GHG accounting.

The whitepaper from Ecoact (developed in alliance with NatWest group and Lloyds Banking Group) and ecometrica has proposed a methodology to help sustainability practitioners easily account for these emissions. As a general guideline, both methodologies account for the incremental energy usage to power office equipment, lighting, and using heating and cooling equipment at home-work spaces. Based on these approaches, we propose a methodology to measure your employee’s carbon footprint while working from home.

tip 1: create employee profiles.

Ideally, you can conduct a sample questionnaire or partner with internal teams to identify the total number of employees working from home on a monthly basis; their geographical location; the number of people working from the same household; percentage of people working from home per region; types of equipment used and additional information that may be relevant on equipment use and heating/cooling preferences.

Estimate employee working hours for full-time employees. You could estimate 8 or 9 hours per workday, assuming that employees will be working all day long and may leave lighting and equipment running on during their lunch break.

Estimate working hours per week. Usually, it is estimated that employees work 160 hours per month, which would be 1,920 hours approximately per year. Define total workweeks with your team internally, considering company policies on break times and benefits.

If you are finding it hard to locate data, Ecoact and ecometrica provide helpful assumptions you can use to estimate average consumption across global regions.

Electricity to power equipment and lighting in home-office space

To account for the electricity consumption to power employee’s laptop, secondary screens, printers, and mobile devices, both methodologies refer to information from the CIBSE “Chartered Institute of Building Engineers” (2012-SectionF, 12.1), which estimates the average use of power load of equipment at the working station as 140 watts.

Then, to calculate working hours per month (Whpm) you must first calculate the work hours per year (Whpy) and divide it by 12.

Once you have estimated the number of employees working from home and the total number of working hours, get your your calculator out:

power load of equipment (month)

the average use of power load of equipment (140 watts)

the total number of full-time employees working from home

the total hours worked by full-time employees each year

To calculate the incremental use of electricity to light your workstation, Ecoact methodology assumes an allowance of 10 watts for lighting. The calculation to estimate consumption for lighting home office workstation is as follows:

power load of lighting (year)

the average use of power load for lighting (10 watts)

the total number of full-time employees working from home

the total hours worked by full-time employees each year

Finally, sum both power loads from equipment and lighting to calculate the incremental use of electricity of home working for an annual consumption. Once you have estimated total average consumption, you’ll need to apply emission factors based on the geographic locations of your employees to estimate GHG emissions in CO2 equivalents. If you’re in the US, apply grid-average factors from regional emission from the EPA (2020) or, for locations outside the US, consider country-level emission factors from IEA (2020).

tip 2: don’t use market-based methodology to account for renewable energy.

This methodology considers the location-based methodology from the GHG protocol to estimate emissions in CO2e. Unless your employees can justify renewable energy from a recognized REC or I-REC, you should not use the market-based methodology to account for the use of renewable energy.

Heating and Cooling from emission sources

Estimating Heating and Cooling energy consumption will depend on your calculations assumptions and the geographic location of your employees. Start by determining the heating and cooling needs considering climate regional variations. This is particularly relevant for countries such as the US with different regional types of climate. For instance, employees located in a city such as San Francisco, may not rely on their AC during the summer season as their counterparts in a city like New York, where the use of heating and cooling increases and varies per season.

In addition it is important to take into account that not all home energy consumption should be attributed to home working. To account for the additionality of 1 person staying at home, Ecoact estimated that approximately one third of employees had living arrangements where at least one household member would remain at home during the day prior to COVID. For this reason 66.7% of employees moving to homeworking would result in incremental heating.

How much GHG emissions would your employees emit to keep them warm during the chill season while working from home?

Estimate the regional average heating demand used in equipment that uses gas and electricity separately.

Inputs:

You will need to calculate the average electricity consumption for heating per region in kWh per hour. There are several ways to obtain this, below is a sample formula:

average energy consumption per home per region per year (kwh / home / year)

% of energy use for heating for region

1 / 365 days per year

1/ hours of heating use in one day (i.e. 12 hours)

the total number of employees using gas/electricity equipment (%)

Then, you can use the formula below:

average energy consumption for heating per region (kwh / h)

the total number of full-time employees working from home

the total hours worked by full-time employees each month

increase in energy consumption caused by employee staying home (66.7%)

12 months in a year

tip 3: consider regional average heating/cooling annual demand.

The regional location and secondary sources of information for the country level should be used to estimate the use of heating and cooling equipment. Ecoact estimates that it takes 5 kWh of gas to heat your home for an hour (UK-DATA) and an extra 800 kWh to keep employees warm a month for the period of October-March and for 12 hours.

Find local sources for additional information: US, Europe 1, Europe 2, iea
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) indicates that 50% of American homes use natural gas in heating equipment. The rest is attributable to incremental electricity per heating equipment.

How many GHG emissions would your employees emit while working from home to stay cool during summer?

In the US, Ecoact suggests that 90% of homes have access to AC equipment ( an average of 73% use a central and 27% an individual cooling system). You can use the same formula for heating to estimate average electricity consumption for cooling. You can also use this alternative methodology below.

Considering regional average variabilities and summer-season running from June to September, you could calculate:

average energy consumption of central systems per hour (3.5 kwh / h) or 1.4 kwh/h for individual systems

% of employees that use a central system / individual system

the total number of full-time employees working from home

the total hours worked by full-time employees each month

% of employees that have an ac at home (i.e. 90%)

NOTE: We are aware that the methodologies proposed by Ecoact and Ecometrica provide the first framework to adopt a transparent and comprehensive methodology in measuring emissions from homeworking. This is our contribution to this conversation as we expect to improve the robustness and reliability of this guidance.

To learn more about how we can help your company in understanding your GHG emissions, get local energy consumption data and communicate your climate strategies to your stakeholders please contact us.