Imagine a faucet at your home… Virtually no one would leave a faucet running – to the point where we can’t even fall asleep when we hear water dripping from the bathroom faucet. We need to make sure it’s closed – period.

Why is that? It’s not the sound of the dripping that keeps us awake, seeing as though we can sleep perfectly fine when it’s raining outside. After some thorough questioning it appears to be the feeling of spillage keeping us awake. That one annoying drip apparently is enough to make people get out of bed, which is in stark contrast to the way we deal with our energy use.

A leaking faucet accounts for 1.575 litre per year – 1 drip per second; 20,000 drips per litre – which results in €2,37 per year of dripping. Not particularly a massive loss.

 The cost of 1 Watt continuous usage for a year amounts to approximately €2. But, of course, it doesn’t end there. Most people don’t even think twice about leaving their Wi-Fi router throughout the year. Assuming it’s a 12 Watt usage, that’s the equivalent of 10 dripping faucets. Moreover, the CO2 emission of the router (± 440 g CO2 / kWh) is about 82 times bigger than the faucet’s (± 0,36 g CO2 / litre water). This is a significant difference, but it even gets bigger.

The minimum electricity usage (or baseload) of an average Dutch family is approximately 150 Watts. This use is often invisible – it’s the TV on standby, the computer in hibernation mode, the alarm clock on your bedside table, the central heating unit. But it’s the little things that often matter most. Those 150 Watts are responsible for €300 annually that people lose while they sleep. We would have to let 127 faucets drip to reach that amount. Furthermore, we would need an impressive 1,020 faucets to match the CO2 emission.

Bear in mind, this is only one household – of which there are approximately 7,7 million in the Netherlands. This means that this careless usage costs society nearly €2,3 billion every year, and negatively impacts the environment because of the extra 4,4 megatons of CO2…

The European energy targets for 2020 are a good trigger for action: CO2 emissions and energy use need to be reduced 20%. Furthermore, another 20% of sustainable energy needs to be generated. This clearly requires drastic changes, which means the energy transition will be top priority on political and corporate agendas for years to come.
However, the real potential for change lies in our homes and the biggest changes occur on a personal level, in people’s individual experience of energy.

Perhaps the smartest among us know exactly how much energy we have used over the past few years, while in the future we will know exactly how much we use today. Switching to a new energy provider will thus become much easier. It won’t be easy to break the trust and take the risk to do it, since in many countries the energy market is close to a monopoly.

But the first omens have been witnessed: taking the same example of the Netherlands 15,1% of energy consumers switched providers in 2015 (source: Energie Nederland). Over the years, we have become more willing to pay for fridges that use less energy and LED screens that switch off by themselves. Some of us have even reached the point where we switch-off plugs in the fuse-box before leaving the house. It’s an action that offers perspective for today and tomorrow, only if we anticipate it correctly.